ABSTRACT
Title of Document:
Illusion and Disillusionment in the Works of Jeff
Wall and Gerhard Richter: Picturing
(Post)Modern Life
Virginia Adams, Ph.D. 2007
Directed By:
Professor Steven A. Mansbach, Department of
Art History and Archaeology
This study is a meta-critique of the discourse surrounding the emergence of
large-scale, color photography around 1980 and the concurrent “return to painting”
through an examination of the art praxes of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter. As
Western avant-garde art shifted from conceptual practices toward large-scale,
figurative painting and photography during the late 1970s and early 1980s, there
developed a vociferous discourse that, to a large degree, was highly critical of the
changes that were taking place.
The most strident aspect of the discourse emanated from fundamentally
Marxist critics and academicians who viewed the turn to more aesthetically-based art
forms as an undesirable capitulation to the political hegemony of the conservative
administration in the United States, and to a burgeoning and increasingly international
art market fueled by improving economic conditions. This criticism looked less than
carefully at the art and the stated positions of the artists. This study mines the critical
writings about both Wall and Richter in order to illuminate the discourse and
elucidate the limits of art-historical writing that arises from rigid theoretical positions.
It focuses particularly on the writings of Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp,
Rosalind Krauss and Jean-François Chevrier. The writings of Wall and Richter are
also given considerable weight and their voices are invoked as full participants.
The works of Wall and Richter involve inextricable combinations of
photography and painting in very different ways, and the role of medium within the
discourse is examined. In addition, the artists’ references in their works to art forms
of earlier periods in the history of Modernism are also considered. Although this
study focuses on the period 1976 to 1990, it pays considerable attention to
connections between early twentieth century German and Russian theories of
montage and the art of Jeff Wall, and Wall’s illuminated transparencies are
emphasized.
The geographic scope of the study includes North America and West
Germany, where much of the controversy about the “return to painting” was
generated, and where exhibitions of the work of both Wall and Richter occurred
frequently during the study period.
ILLUSION AND DISILLUSIONMENT IN THE WORKS OF JEFF WALL AND
GERHARD RICHTER: PICTURING (POST)MODERN LIFE
By
VIRGINIA ADAMS
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
2007
Advisory Committee:
Professor Steven A. Mansbach, Chair
Professor Saverio Giovacchini
Andy Grundberg
Professor William Pressly
Professor Joshua A. Shannon
© Copyright by
Virginia Adams
2007
DEDICATION
To Neal and Robin
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The help and encouragement of many people stand behind this dissertation.
My professors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of
Maryland provided inspiration and encouragement during my odyssey through art
history that followed my career as a corporate lawyer. In particular, I thank Steven A.
Mansbach, my dissertation advisor, whose brilliance permeated our discussions of my
proposal through defense of the dissertation. I will always be grateful for Steven’s
pointedly specific suggestions that emanated from his deep knowledge and
understanding of art of the twentieth century, as well as for his perspective on this
rather remarkable academic process.
I also wish to thank members of my defense committee, William Pressly,
Joshua Shannon, Andy Grundberg and Saverio Giovacchini, for the time that they
gave to reading the dissertation and for their very engaged participation and insightful
suggestions and questions during the defense. They made the defense not only
challenging, but enjoyable.
Wendy Grossman and Martha Bari, fellow graduate students who finished
before me, provided invaluable friendship, perspective on the process, and
opportunities to vent frustration and laugh about writing a dissertation. I look
forward to our continued friendship and collaboration.
It goes without saying that I am most grateful to my husband, Neal
Friedlander, and our daughter, Robin Friedlander, who understood my desire to study
art history in the depth that pursuing this degree has required, and who generously, if
somewhat bemusedly, accepted the time that it has taken.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures .............................................................................................................. vi
Introduction....................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: The Big Picture ........................................................................................13
The Return to Painting ...................................................................................18
The Picture .....................................................................................................24
The Postmodern Picture.................................................................................25
The Tableau—an Earlier History...................................................................31
The Contemporary Picture as Tableau...........................................................35
Jeff Wall’s Pictures ........................................................................................45
Gerhard Richter’s Pictures.............................................................................52
What Is a Picture? ..........................................................................................53
Chapter 2: What’s a Pure Medium?.............................................................................56
What Is a Medium?.......................................................................................60
The Postmodern Medium.............................................................................65
Another View of Medium: Rosalind Krauss ...............................................67
Krauss Rewrites Clement Greenberg’s Concept of
Medium ....................................................................................................81
Jeff Wall’s Medium .....................................................................................88
Wall’s Medium Critiqued ............................................................................95
Rosalind Krauss on Jeff Wall ....................................................................101
Gerhard Richter’s Photopaintings..............................................................106
Critical Response to Richter’s Photopaintings ..........................................109
Commentary on Benjamin Buchloh...........................................................119
Is There a Pure Medium?...........................................................................127
Conclusion .................................................................................................131
Chapter 3: Disillusionment: The Disruption of Scopic Pleasure in
Jeff Wall’s Pictures ...............................................................................133
Gestus and Gesture: The Legacy of Brecht and Benjamin ........................ 139
Borders and Wires.......................................................................................157
The Radical Oblique and the Abject Subject..............................................162
Dirt and Washing ........................................................................................183
Blind Windows ...........................................................................................186
Wall’s Disillusionment ...............................................................................187
Forest Pictures.............................................................................................188
Transparency and Opacity in Gerhard Richter’s Scopic
Disruptions...............................................................................................189
iv
Summary Statement ...................................................................................................194
Selected Bibliography................................................................................................196
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Chapter One:
Fig. I-1.
Louise Lawler, Why Pictures Now. 1981. Black and white photograph.
3 x 6 in.
Fig. I-2. Gerhard Richter, Table. 1962. Oil on canvas. 90.2 x 113 cm.
Fig. I-3. Gerhard Richter, Ema (Nude on a Staircase). 1966. Oil on canvas.
200 x 130 cm.
Fig. I-4. Gerhard Richter, Bridge (By the Sea). 1969. Oil on canvas. 93 x 98 cm.
Fig. I-5. Gerhard Richter, Two Candles. 1982. Oil on canvas. 140 x 140 cm.
Fig. I-6. Gerhard Richter, Marian. 1983. Oil on canvas. 200 x 200 cm.
Fig. I-7. Gerhard Richter, Annunciation after Titian. Oil on canvas. 125.4
x 200.3 cm.
Chapter Two:
Fig. II-1. Jeff Wall, Restoration. 1993. Transparency in lightbox. 137 x 507 cm.
Fig. II-2. Gerhard Richter, Court Chapel, Dresden. 2000. Oil on canvas.
80 x 93 cm.
Chapter Three:
Fig. III-1. Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room. 1978. Transparency in lightbox.
159 x 234 cm.
Fig. III-2. Jeff Wall, Mimic. 1982. Transparency in lightbox. 198 x 229 cm.
Fig. III-3. Jeff Wall, Outburst. 1989. Transparency in lightbox. 229 x 312 cm.
Fig. III-4. Jeff Wall, A Villager from Aricakoyu Arriving in Mahmutbey—Istanbul,
September, 1997. 1997. Transparency in lightbox. 209 x 271.5 cm.
Fig. III-5. Jeff Wall, Steves Farm, Steveston. 1980. Transparency in lightbox.
57 x 229 cm.
Fig. III-6. Jeff Wall, Bad Goods. 1984. Transparency in lightbox. 229 x 347 cm.
Fig. III-7. Jeff Wall, Diatribe. 1985. Transparency in lightbox. 229 x 203 cm.
vi
Fig. III-8. Jeff Wall, The Storyteller. 1986. Transparency in lightbox. 229 x 437
cm.
Fig. III-9. Jeff Wall, Diagonal Composition. 1993. Transparency in lightbox.
40 x 46 cm.
Fig. III-10. Jeff Wall, Diagonal Composition no. 2. 1998. Transparency in lightbox.
52.7 x 63.7 cm.
Fig. III-11. Jeff Wall, Diagonal Composition no. 3. 2000. Transparency in lightbox.
74.5 x 94 cm.
Fig. III-12. Jeff Wall, Peas and Sauce. 1999. Transparency in lightbox. 49 x 61 cm.
Fig. III-13. Jeff Wall, Rainfilled Suitcase. 2001. Transparency in lightbox.
90 x 120 cm.
Fig. III-14. Jeff Wall, Man in Street. 1995. Transparency in lightbox. 53 x 132 cm.
Fig. III-15. Jeff Wall, Just Washed. 1997. Transparency in lightbox. 47 x 52 cm.
Fig. III-16. Jeff Wall, Bloodstained Garment. 2003. Transparency in lightbox.
139 x 176.5 cm.
Fig. III-17. Jeff Wall, A Wall in a Former Bakery. 2003. Transparency in lightbox.
119 x 151 cm.
Fig. III-18. Jeff Wall, Some Beans. 1990. Transparency in lightbox. 182 x 229 cm.
Fig. III-19. Jeff Wall, An Octopus. 1990. Transparency in lightbox. 182 x 229 cm.
Fig. III-20. Wols, Untitled (Beans). ca. 1938-39. Black and white photograph.
Fig. III-21. Wols, Untitled (Rolled Cheese). ca. 1938-39. Black and white
photograph.
Fig. III-22. Wols, Untitled (Chicken Biting Its Leg). ca. 1938-39. Black and white
photograph.
Fig. III-23. Wols, Untitled (Bucket). ca. 1938-39. Black and white photograph.
Fig. III-24. Jeff Wall, Swept. 1995. Transparency in lightbox. 175 x 216 cm.
Fig. III-25. Jeff Wall, Housekeeping. 1996. Silver gelatin print. 203 x 260 cm.
vii
Fig. III-26. Jeff Wall, Volunteer. 1996. Silver gelatin print. 221.5 x 313 cm.
Fig. III-27. Jeff Wall, Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona.
1999. Transparency in lightbox. 187 x 351 cm.
Fig. III-28. Jeff Wall, Blind Window no. 1. 2000. Transparency in lightbox.
109 x 133 cm.
Fig. III-29. Jeff Wall, Blind Window no. 2. 2000. Transparency in lightbox.
134 x 170.5 cm.
Fig. III-30. Jeff Wall, Blind Window no. 3. 2000. C-print. 23.5 x 29.5 cm.
Fig. III-31. Gerhard Richter, Lovers in the Forest. 1966. Oil on canvas.
170 x 200 cm.
Fig. III-32. Jeff Wall, Forest. 2001. Silver gelatin print. 230 x 290 cm.
Fig. III-33. Gerhard Richter, Curtain III (bright). 1965. Oil on canvas.
200 x 195 cm.
Fig. III-34. Gerhard Richter, Shadow Painting. 1968. Oil on canvas. 67 x 87 cm.
Fig. III-35. Gerhard Richter, Four Panes of Glass. 1967. Glass and enameled steel.
Each pane 190 x 100 cm.
Fig. III-36. Gerhard Richter, Gray Mirror. 1992. Oil on canvas, four panels.
Each panel 300 x 100 cm.
Fig. III-37. Gerhard Richter, Eight Gray. 2002. Gray enameled glass and steel.
Each panel 500 x 270 x 50 cm.
Fig. III-38. Gerhard Richter, detail from 128 Details from a Picture. 1978. Black
and white photograph.
viii
DISCLAIMER
The dissertation document that follows has had referenced material removed
in respect for the owner’s copyright A complete version of this document, which
includes said referenced material, resides in the University of Maryland, College
Park’s library collection.
ix
ILLUSION AND DISILLUSIONMENT IN THE WORKS OF
JEFF WALL AND GERHARD RICHTER:
PICTURING (POST)MODERN LIFE
Introduction
This study is a theoretical analysis of the discourse surrounding the emergence
of large-scale, color photography during the late 1970s, as the prevalence of
photographically-based Conceptual Art began to wane. The study focuses on the
years 1976 to 1990, with 1980 as the pivotal year in the shift away from Conceptual
Art that had prevailed from the mid-1960s during the peak of Minimalism and Pop
Art and extended through the late 1970s. The conceptual art movement had valorized
work that was typically photographic, utilizing black-and-white, deskilled snapshots
frequently combined with text to create art that was not just unaesthetic, but antiaesthetic. A major goal of Conceptual Art had been to thwart the institution of the
museum, the art market and what had come to be termed the “culture industry.” The
shift was toward art that was narrative, pictorial, large-scale, and in color. The
emergence of the new photographic form occurred in concert with a resurgence of
large-scale painting. This study places primary emphasis on the critical and arthistorical writings of the period, while paying close attention to the art and writings of
Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter, artists who played key roles in the described shifts.
A plethora of essays chronicled the changes that art historians and curators
were observing, and comprised the discourse of the period. Those who evaluated art
from a fundamentally Marxist perspective, primarily in reliance upon the writings of
Walter Benjamin and other theorists of the first decades of the twentieth century,
abjured what appeared to them to be a tidal wave of art that seemed specifically
1
designed for the gallery, the museum and the market. They expressed disdain for
conservative developments in the American political regime and changes in the
economy as they affected art production and consumption. Other writers, of course,
celebrated the resurgence of painting evidenced in numerous exhibitions of West
German and American Neoexpressionism and the Italian Transavantgarde.
Methodology
The methodology of the study is the creation of a meta-critique through an
examination of the key theoretical arguments propounded during the period as they
developed, and, particularly, as they were applied to the art production of two artists
whose works emblematize the issues at stake. The artists are Jeff Wall, a Canadian
photographer whose photographic transparencies derive significant inspiration from
historic painting and cinema, and Gerhard Richter, a German painter whose work
integrally involves photography. A major purpose of the study is to illuminate the
limitations of the criticisms of the resurgence of figurative and pictorial art, which
tended to approach it from preconceived theoretical positions, and to gloss over the
critical stances that the artists themselves voiced in writings and interviews.
Moreover, it is argued that the Marxist historians failed to look seriously at Wall’s art,
in particular, thus underestimating its conversance with some of the theoretical
positions that the critics themselves espoused.
In examining the theoretical discourse of the period, this study historicizes the
works of Wall and Richter by placing them in the context of the moment of 1980.
Yet, it is emphatically the case that the discourse engages earlier historical periods to
which their work directly relates. For example, Jeff Wall’s transparencies of the early
2
1980s reconstruct, or re-present, some well-known nineteenth-century French
paintings made on the cusp of Modernism, and some of his later transparencies
appropriate ideas that arose within photography during the early twentieth century.
As a painter who incorporates photography integrally within his praxis, Richter also
has produced a hybrid art that has addressed art forms that range from the readymade,
to Pop Art, to history and landscape painting, to Abstract Expressionism. Thus, his
painting incorporates art-historical as well as photographic models. As a
consequence of the complex kinds of works that both Wall and Richter produce, the
immediate focus on the critical writing of the period of the study necessarily requires
consideration of earlier periods. It pays close attention, however, to the interweaving
of the art and the writings of the artists themselves, in order to reveal the strengths
and limits of theoretical approaches that eschew full engagement with the art and
related writings, and therefore tend to dismiss them. Given the intellectual
orientations of the two artists, their voices are fully integrated into the study.
As implied by the foregoing, the production of art, rather than its reception, is
the greater focus of this investigation. Although reception of an artwork is in many
ways a consideration inseparable from production, and Chapter Three concerning the
disruption of scopic pleasure addresses reception to an important degree, the study’s
primary focus is the making of the work and the theories that inform that process.
The reasons for this emphasis are, first, that the theoretical concerns that underlie
much of the writing of the period involve the ways in which art is produced and the
related concept of art medium, and, second, the need for economy, clarity and
comprehensibility. Thus, exhibitions of art that are mentioned in the study are not
3
fully analyzed from the perspective of reception. A thorough examination of the
reception of Wall’s and Richter’s artworks would require a very different
investigation.
Although the artworks of the two artists are the lenses through which this
study is focused, it is not intended as a monograph on either of them. Indeed, their
work and careers have been extensively catalogued, chronicled and critiqued by
others. The extraordinary amount of critical attention paid to the oeuvres of Wall and
Richter, however, facilitates (and complicates) consideration of the larger issues at
stake. The study focuses primarily on the photography of Wall as a result of his
participation in the discourse through his art-making procedures, his academic study
of art history, and his prolific writings and interviews.
Richter, who is half a generation older than Wall and began his mature art
practice in 1962, is included more as a touchstone, or perhaps as a foil for Wall, in
order to address the complexities of painting in the period. But Richter, too, has
produced numerous published writings in the forms of diary entries or notes, letters,
catalogue texts and statements for press conferences, and has given interviews that
inform his approach. His praxis represents an intellectual approach to painting, which
he has conducted in Germany since World War II. Thus, Richter’s painting and
commentaries provide valuable insights not only into the period, but, also, into the art
of others who have contended with the uniquely West German political, social and
intellectual issues of the late twentieth century.
It is to be acknowledged that neither Wall nor Richter is treated simply as a
representative of photographers or painters during the period of the study. Their
4
respective bodies of work are extraordinarily complex and multivalenced, and, thus,
neither is considered as just one of a group, or as an example of a type of praxis.
Rather, each of them can be viewed as a limit case because of the theoretical issues
that his work raises within the discourse of the period. That is the primary reason for
their selection as subjects for this investigation.
Geographic scope
Geographic considerations have contributed significantly to the choices of
Wall and Richter. The locus of much of the discussion about the “return to painting”
took place within North America, particularly New York, and in West Germany, and
the geographic scope of this study is limited to those venues. Neoexpressionism
surfaced in West Germany and New York, and generated controversy that was carried
on with regard to art originating in both places. Although some of Richter’s work
reveals a specifically national consciousness, particularly his 1960s photopaintings of
subjects that relate to World War II, and October 18, 1977 (1989), his cycle of history
photopaintings about the Baader-Meinhof group, interest in contemporary art during
the period of the study was decidedly international. It would be difficult and
counterproductive to separate West German from American art or the critical writings
generated in New York from those of Western Europe. Therefore, this study
addresses the circulation of post-1960 West German art in the United States during
the 1980s, and the contentious discourse surrounding it.
Moreover, the interest in Wall’s and Richter’s work overlapped
geographically. Richter’s painting was first shown in New York in a group
exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969, and his first one-person exhibition in
5
New York occurred in 1973. His abstract paintings were included in a group
exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1985, and a retrospective
organized there in 1988 traveled to three U. S. venues. Through the 1980s (and, of
course, beyond), Richter’s work has been shown at an accelerating pace in Europe
and North America. The first example of Wall’s mature work was shown in
Vancouver in 1978, but it quickly surfaced in West Germany: in Cologne at
“Westkunst: Contemporary Art since 1939” (1981); in Kassel at Documenta 7
(1982); and many times in Germany through the decade of the eighties to the present.
As one would expect, Richter’s work also was included in “Westkunst” and
Documenta 7. The point is that each artist was internationally recognized during this
period, generating and demonstrating strong interest in both West Germany and the
United States.
With specific regard to photography in West Germany and North America
during the period of this study, a group of photographers trained by Bernd and Hilla
Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy began in the late 1970s to produce bodies of
documentary photographic work of large scale and in color that form a significant
part of the postmodern photographic art phenomenon. Although the ideas underlying
the photography of artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff and
Thomas Struth derive, in part, from a long history of the typology and the archive that
is particularly German, its presence within the international world of contemporary
art undoubtedly influenced many others who produce large-scale color photography.
Those artists, along with others such as Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra and Americans
6
Gregory Crewdson and Joel Sternfeld, for example, populate the photographic milieu
in which both Wall and Richter have practiced.
Theoretical discourse
A significant portion of the critical writing of the period concerned with the
subject of this study—certainly the most strident—has been published in the journal
October, founded in 1976 on the cusp of the inception of the shift to large-scale
figurative art, and proclaimed by its editors to have a generally Marxist approach to
art history and criticism. The writers were based in New York and looked critically at
new art as it was shown. It is therefore essential to engage rather extensively with the
writings of members of the October group who have been most adamant in their
criticism of the transparencies of Jeff Wall, yet supportive of the photopaintings of
Gerhard Richter. Accordingly, Rosalind Krauss’s exploration of the concept of
medium, Douglas Crimp’s ideological critique of the institution of the museum and
Benjamin Buchloh’s castigation of painting while valorizing Richter’s production are
given significant attention in the study. A sustained and positive view of Wall’s work
has been provided by French photography historian Jean-François Chevrier, who
follows a more traditional modernist approach.
Temporal scope
The year 1976 has been selected as the beginning for several key reasons. As
noted above, it marked the founding of October, which was a signal harbinger of and
influence upon the discourse that was to follow. It was also the year in which
Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings, perhaps his most aesthetically-oriented ones,
emerged. Following quickly were other indicators of this major turn: Douglas
7
Crimp’s 1977 New York exhibition and essay titled “Pictures” and his theoretical
writings that followed during the next five years; Jeff Wall’s first backlit color
transparency in 1978; and numerous international museum exhibitions featuring
figurative painting: the 1980 Venice Biennale, “Westkust” in 1981, Documenta 7 and
“Zeitgeist” (Berlin) in 1982; and, in 1983, two exhibitions of West German art in the
United States: “Expressions: New Art from Germany” organized by the St. Louis Art
Museum, and “New Figuration: Contemporary Art from Germany” at the University
of California, Los Angeles. In 1981 and 1982, Benjamin Buchloh, a German-born art
historian who has written extensively on Richter, published two provocative essays
deriding the return to painting and praising conceptual, montage-based, reproductive
art-making procedures. Those texts engendered vociferous responses, which together
helped set the terms of the protracted debate that has continued to the present.
The study is organized as follows:
Chapter One: The Big Picture
Chapter One sets the stage and provides background for the period and issues
in question. The “big picture” is defined, and this phenomenon is evidenced by the
emergence of large-scale photography and the proliferation of exhibitions of painting
in Western Europe and the United States. It is also shown to be related to changes in
the economy and the art market. This chapter establishes the start of the discourse
around the postmodern concept of the picture, beginning with Douglas Crimp’s 1977
exhibition and eponymous essay “Pictures.” It then turns to Diderot’s eighteenthcentury concept of the tableau, and traces it to the period of the study through the
writings of Roland Barthes, Michael Fried and Jean-François Chevrier. Finally, Jeff
8
Wall’s and Gerhard Richter’s approaches to picturing in their respective praxes are
discussed, noting that they are primarily concerned with producing “pictures,”
whether in photography or in paint.
Chapter Two: What’s a Pure Medium?
The question of medium is seminal to this discussion. Robert Rauschenberg’s
question, posed in 1961, was prescient given the attention paid to this issue ever
since. The views of medium espoused by Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg and
Michael Fried are considered in order to understand where the discourse began and
how it evolved during the 1970s.
The October-based art historians have been particularly concerned with the
notion of medium, as it is so integrally a part of the means of production of an art
object, and the choice and handling of the material of a medium or mediums have had
much to do with their critical reactions. The concern with medium connects, also, to
the issue of authorial presence, which those writers relate negatively to painting. This
study therefore focuses at length on issues raised by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss
and Benjamin Buchloh.
Crimp set the stage for the critique of painting and the concept of medium in
the postmodern period with a series of essays written in the late 1970s and early
1980s in which he valorized a mix of photographically-based mediums and
proclaimed the end of painting. His efforts were directed toward thwarting the
institutional authority of the museum. Krauss, too, has focused from the late 1970s to
the present on the concept of medium in the course of applying what are essentially
early twentieth-century standards (particularly through ideas advanced by Walter
9
Benjamin) to art of the late twentieth century. She has been a pointed critic of Jeff
Wall with specific regard to his medium. Buchloh, a champion of certain forms of
conceptual art, is, in some ways, the most perplexing member of the group in
espousing standards similar to those of the others in castigating the return to painting.
Yet, he has focused much attention since the mid-seventies on Richter, whose
painting he finds sufficiently “dialectical.” His goals are more overtly political and
social, evidenced by his view that art should contest the dominant culture industry.
The variety of approaches that art historians and critics have taken to Jeff
Wall’s enlistment of cinematic and painting models for his photography are reviewed,
and Wall’s evolving approach to his own medium is elucidated. Finally, Gerhard
Richter’s attitude toward the issue of medium in his photopaintings is discussed,
along with the critical response of Benjamin Buchloh and the discourse that his
writings have engendered.
Chapter Three: Disillusionment: The Disruption of Scopic Pleasure in Jeff
Wall’s Pictures
Although both artists produce pictorial, or illusionistic, art (with the
exceptions of Richter’s abstract paintings, gray paintings and mirror works), each, in
several and very different ways, obscures, obfuscates or complicates the viewer’s
reading and understanding of his pictures. Thus, as a viewer approaches the works,
the initial perception of an illusion is gradually dispelled. Intellectual work is
required to glean an understanding of what each of Wall and Richter has to say, and
one is never certain that enough work has been done.
This chapter looks at the ways in which Jeff Wall has utilized critical avantgarde theories of the early twentieth century to make his backlit transparencies
10
dialectical or instructive. The Destroyed Room, his first work, illustrates Wall’s early
enlistment of the ideas of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Further examples
from the 1980s show the degree to which Wall is conversant with those ideas,
particularly the notion of gesture as a form of rupture. His work is then analyzed to
show the incorporation of the concept of the radical oblique, recalling the 1920s
photography of Aleksander Rodchenko, combined with the depiction of abject
subjects, drawing on the work of surrealist writer Bataille and photographer Wols.
The examination concludes that the multiple fissures and ruptures in Wall’s work,
particularly in the 1980s, detract from, or at least complicate, visual pleasure and, for
the viewer who is aware of those histories, make the work instructive. Thus, the
criticisms that it is “totalizing” or uninventive are unfounded.
This chapter moves from Wall to Richter with a comparison of grisaille forest
scenes in which the artists have camouflaged the presence of human figures. Those
similar images provide a transition to Richter’s very different ways of disrupting or
frustrating scopic understanding and pleasure for his viewers. This is a much more
abbreviated examination of Richter’s extensive oeuvre than is the examination of
Wall’s work, and focuses on his gray paintings, blind windows and enameled mirrors.
Summary Statement
As Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter emerged onto the international art scene in
the late seventies and early eighties (understanding that Richter was rather well
known in West Germany by the late sixties), they faced a developing and rather
vociferous discourse that would have suggested that each in his own way was
swimming against the tide. Painting was said to be dead, and large-scale color
11
photography was enough like painting to be ignored by art historians and critics who
saw postmodern art through the lenses of early twentieth century German and Russian
theories. Wall’s and Richter’s relentless efforts to produce pictures that, with
sustained looking, could be understood by, in Diderot’s terms, “a man of simple
common sense,” were abjured by those who believed such efforts to be socially and
politically regressive.
This study demonstrates that these artists’ pictures are extraordinarily
complex productions that explore and incorporate many facets of the history of
Western art that preceded them. If the pictures respond to the market and museum
(which they surely do), they are not simple pictures. Through an examination of the
art praxes of Wall and Richter, in combination with their respective writings and
statements, this study elucidates the discourse of 1980. It shows that a significant part
of that discourse failed to look adequately at their artwork, and analyzed it from
preconceived theoretical positions. By so doing, it failed to consider seriously the
artists’ critical statements about their own work and the positions that they
consciously assumed within the North American and Western European art milieu.
This study provides a meta-critique of the discourse of the period from 1976
to 1990 that includes the voices of two artists who were fully conversant with the
issues at stake. It reaches no conclusions, as it is a chapter in a long narrative that
began with the advent of Modernism. Although the art will change and the terms will
shift, the discussion will continue.
12
CHAPTER ONE
THE BIG PICTURE
In 1981, Louise Lawler produced a three-by-six inch, precisely focused,
black-and-white photograph of a matchbook leaning against the inside rim of a
circular glass ashtray (fig. I-1). 1 The words “WHY PICTURES NOW” are imprinted
on the matchbook. Although a question mark does not follow the text, the implied
question was of critical importance to art of the period, and prescient with regard to
what was becoming a burgeoning photographic practice. Lawler’s photograph speaks
to the transition then in progress: the waning of the conceptual photographic practices
of the previous decade and a half, and the emergence of what has been termed the
“photographic tableau.”
In the late 1970s, and certainly by 1980, a significant and noticeable change
had occurred in the kinds of photography that some artists were producing. The
scale, clarity and color of the photographs of artists working in Düsseldorf and
Vancouver, in particular, had entered a new realm, giving photographs the impact of
large paintings. Fabrication could involve placing transparencies in lightboxes,
adding stark white borders and wood frames, or mounting photographs to aluminum
or Plexiglas plates. These works took on the nature of large objects, quite
distinguishable from the familiar notebook-sized black-and-white “art” photographs
of the first half of the century, the color-saturated American street and road
1
Lawler’s work to date has remained critical, often combining image with text. It includes
Cibachrome and black-and-white photographs of the work of other artists in the contexts of galleries,
museums, auction houses, public buildings, collectors’ homes and storage areas. See Louise Lawler
and Others, ed. Philipp Kaiser, exh. cat. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004); and Louise Lawler: An
Arrangement of Pictures (New York: Assouline, 2000).
13
photography of the 1960s and 1970s, and the anaesthetic snapshots of Conceptual
Art. 2
The idea informing this chapter is to define the emergence and the nature of
what in simple terms could be called “the big picture,” and to show how it is and is
not related to the contemporary, postmodern strategic photography that was the topic
of so much critical writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This critical writing
took place against the background of a number of exhibitions of national and
international scope that were dominated by painting. Those exhibitions took place in
Europe, particularly in West Germany, and in North America. They reflected and
fueled an ideological divide within the world of art and the discourse surrounding it.
The emergence of large-scale photographic imagery occurred within the
context of advances in commercial photographic technology. In the late 1970s, the
physical production of large-scale prints and transparencies first became possible, and
artists using photography quickly took advantage of advances in the realm of
commercial photography. By “large scale,” I am referring to photographs designed
for the wall, with dimensions of at least four-by-four feet, and up to six-by-thirteen,
or nine-by-six feet. The physical presence of such works commands attention in a
2
The art photographs of the first decades of the twentieth century, such as those shown at the several
galleries of Alfred Stieglitz from 1908 until 1946, typically measured approximately nine by seven
inches, and rarely exceeded ten by twelve inches. See Sarah Greenough, Modern Art and America:
Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; Boston:
Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown, 2000), 530-41. Walker Evans’s documentary photographs taken
throughout his career between 1927 and 1974 were frequently approximately nine by seven inches, and
many were smaller. See Maria Morris Hambourg, et al., Walker Evans, exh. cat. (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 300-09. The color
photographs of Stephen Shore from the 1970s were typically eight by ten inches, and rarely exceeded
11 x 14 inches. William Eggleston’s color works of the same period ranged up to approximately 13 x
19 inches.
14
way that is comparable to that of traditional history paintings. 3 French art historian
Jean-François Chevrier has observed that beginning in the 1980s, photography
changed notably in terms of its physical enlargement and its adoption of what he has
termed the form of the “tableau.” This resulted in a new relationship between
photographs and viewers and, thus, moved photography into the realm of “high” art. 4
Michael Fried has also commented on the “material alterations” that had taken place
in the scale of photography by 1980. 5
Another important influence on the emergence of the photographic tableau
was economic. It paralleled painting’s return to figuration: the Neue Wilde in West
3
Sample image dimensions of Jeff Wall’s color transparencies in lightboxes are The Destroyed Room
(1978), 159 x 234 cm; Milk (1984), 187 x 229 cm; The Storyteller (1986), 229 x 437 cm; and The
Agreement (1987), 191 x 370 cm. Andreas Gursky’s chromogenic color prints increased in size
beginning in the late 1980s: Niagra Falls (1989) is 150 x 120 cm; Tokyo Stock Exchange (1990) is
188 x 230 cm; Paris, Montparnasse (1993) is 205 x 421 cm; and May Day IV (2000) is 207.6 x 508
cm. The dimensions given for Gursky’s work include the wooden frames and white borders, as
Gursky does not record the precise dimensions of his images. Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky, exh. cat.,
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 184. Unframed dimensions of examples of Thomas
Struth’s color images are The Shimada Family, Yamaguchi (1986), 94.5 x 133.5 cm; Louvre IV, Paris
(1989), 137 x 172.5 cm; and San Zaccaria, Venice (1995), 180 x 228.5 cm. Gursky and Struth mount
their photographs directly to a Plexiglas plate and frame them. Charles Wylie, “A History of Now:
The Art of Thomas Struth,” in Thomas Struth: 1977 2002, exh. cat. (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art,
2002), 152.
4
Jean-François Chevrier, a professor at l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, has written
frequently on late twentieth-century photography. According to Chevrier, “Until the beginning of the
1980s, it was nearly impossible for a photograph to be a tableau without having been transformed or
transposed into painting as Andy Warhol, Richter, and the photorealists did.” Further, “The great
discovery of the 1980s was that an image resulting from an operation of recording, restoring a thing
seen, can be in itself a visual thing, not just a ‘souvenir’ but an actual image, which delivers itself and
reveals itself here, now, at the moment of its presentation, in the actuality of perception by a
regardeur, who by looking, as Duchamp said, makes the tableau.” “Shadow and Light,” trans. Andrea
Loselle, in Jean-François Chevrier and Ann Goldstein, A Dialogue about Recent American and
European Photography, exh. cat., (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), 16. Chevrier
does not address the advances in technology that by the late 1970s made possible the photographic
tableau that he identifies as having emerged by the beginning of the 1980s.
5
Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 562-63. Speaking of
Barthes’s Camera Lucida as a commentary on “an image-making regime that is all but defunct,” Fried
said, “In fact two such material alterations were either on the way or currently taking place:
digitalization, which by the 1990s would thoroughly transform the ontology of the photograph, and a
considerable increase in the size of art photographs, which already in 1980 was enabling works such as
Jeff Wall’s light-box transparencies or Thomas Ruff’s blown-up portrait photographs of art students to
address more than a single beholder at the same time. Intimately related to the increase of size was the
display of those photographs on gallery and museum walls or, rather, the fact that photographs like
Wall’s and Ruff’s were made in order to be so displayed.”
15
Germany, Neoexpressionism in the United States and the Transavantguardia in Italy.
It has been asserted that the economic upturn of the period fostered a market for this
new art, in stark contrast to the inexpensive, reductivist photographic art of the
conceptual period that was intended to circumvent the market altogether. Mary Jane
Jacob describes a rejuvenation of the market for painting and the appearance of
European painters—notably from Italy and Germany—on the American scene during
the presidency of Ronald Reagan, beginning in 1980. 6 Collectors placed their names
on waiting lists for as-yet-unpainted works by young artists, and certain well-known
collectors enhanced the reputations of artists by collecting their work in depth and
creating private collection museums. The market for new painting was fueled by
articles in popular magazines, the opening of satellite branches of the Whitney
Museum in Manhattan, and significant increases in corporate art collecting. 7 A
published conversation held in 1981 between Ben Lifson, then photography critic for
the Village Voice, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, an art historian of photography,
concerned the recent “trajectory of photography’s ascent” in the marketplace and the
related appropriation of an art-historical, painting-related vocabulary to sell
6
Mary Jane Jacob, “Art in the Age of Reagan, 1980-1988,” in A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of
Representation, ed. Catherine Gudis, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989), 1520.
7
Ibid., 17-19. Jacob cites an article stating that “the number of corporations collecting art has risen
50% in the past five years, to about 1,000.” Meg Cox, “Boom in Art Market Lifts Prices Sharply, Stirs
Fears of a Bust,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 1986. She suggests, also, that corporate collecting in
the 1980s was conservative and favored representational painting, citing Calvin Tompkins, “Medicis,
Inc.,” New Yorker, April 14, 1986, 87. For a perspective on changes in tactics in the sale of art, see
Jeffrey Deitch, “The Art Sanctuary,” FlashArt, no. 88-89 (March-April 1981): 48, in which Deitch
noted a shift in the approaches of New York galleries from the “placement” to the “sale” of art, and
Sotheby’s “hyp[ing] paintings like Hollywood movies.” He asked, “Is an art object still ‘art’ after
commercial exposure has removed its sacred status? Already, we can get a taste of what this is like by
looking at the Dali prints hung up in the model room settings in schlock furniture stores.” An editorial
titled “Art World Follies, 1981: A Special Issue,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 3-4, expressed alarm that
collectors were curating gallery exhibitions, and the institutions that had previously generated public
discourse on art were being bypassed.
16
photography. 8 In attempting to account for the markedly increased interest in
photography, Lifson said,
The prevalent problem for photography is the notion that it is painting
which sets the example, which establishes the visual and intellectual
undertaking, and that photography can be respectable only insofar as it
repeats or rehearses the pictorial strategies of painting. 9
By 1987, writing in what she termed “the age of Reagan,” Abigail SolomonGodeau described the shift from the margins to the center in the approaches of
postmodern photographic artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, artists
whose earlier work had been acclaimed for its oppositional and critical stance in
relation to the dominant culture. 10 Noting that the market for art had been dominated
by painting since 1980, she posited three factors that had contributed to making
photography “comprehensible and desirable:”
Nonetheless, the fact remains that in 1980, the work of Levine or
Prince was largely unsaleable and quite literally incomprehensible to
all but a handful of critics and a not much larger group of other artists.
When this situation changed substantially, it was not primarily because
of the influence of critics or the efforts of dealers. Rather, it was a
result of three factors: the self-created impasse of art photography that
foreclosed the ability to produce anything new for a market that had
been constituted in the previous decade; a vastly expanded market with
new types of purchasers; and the assimilation of postmodernist
strategies back into the mass culture that had in part engendered them.
This last development may be said to characterize postmodernist
photography the third time around, rendering it both comprehensible
and desirable and simultaneously signaling its near-total incorporation
8
Ben Lifson and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Photophilia: A Conversation about the Photography
Scene,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 103-18. In response to Solomon-Godeau’s question, “What do you
think the Whitney [Biennial] emphasis on color was about,” Lifson replied, “The Whitney is saying
that color is important because painting is in color; it’s the same story: photography approximating the
conditions of painting.” Ibid., 113.
9
Ibid., 109.
10
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Living with contradictions: critical practices in the age of supply-side
aesthetics,” in Visual culture: the reader, eds. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London, Thousand Oaks,
CA, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), 224-43; previously published in Screen 28, no. 3 (1987): 223.
17
into those very discourses (advertising, fashion, media) it professed to
critique. 11
The shift to the comprehensible picture in the late 1970s has also been
discussed by Kerry Brougher with regard to art and film:
The emphasis shifted from a dialogue about art—the attempts to
dismantle and examine the phenomenon of art (and cinema)—back to
the image and the problems of making pictures. And in turn, the goal
of art has shifted from a radical reductivism that sought a kind of antiart (and acinematic film) back to images that, like film stills, are
fragments of a greater, more socially inclined text. 12
David Campany, too, has acknowledged the relevance of the market in
considering photography at this juncture: “Photography is now celebrated as the new
Picture—the singular, composed image made for the wall (and the market). It often
relates to other images less through set or sequence than through the socially
absorbed laws of genre, such as landscape, cityscape, still life and narrative
tableau.” 13
The “Return to Painting”
The references to painting in the foregoing discussion suggest that a
resurgence of painting, beginning about 1980, particularly in West Germany, was of
interest and significant concern to art historians and writers of the period. Suzaan
Boettger observed that the reemergence of painterly figuration must have fulfilled a
11
Ibid., 223-24.
Kerry Brougher, “Hall of Mirrors,” in Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945, ed. Russell
Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 20-137, 119. Following the quoted
text, Brougher gave as an example Jeff Wall’s Eviction Struggle (1988), which he called “a synthesis
of panorama, history painting, and cinematic melodrama.”
13
David Campany, “‘Almost the Same Thing’: Some Thoughts on the Collector-Photographer,” in
Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph, ed. Emma Dexter and Thomas
Weski, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 33. Campany continues: “The work of Jeff Wall is
the clearest example of this. It is made explicitly for the gallery wall and like those of many
contemporary photographic artists his many books are monographs and catalogues, rather than integral
works in themselves.” Campany is contrasting the works of contemporary photographers with those of
the artists in “Cruel and Tender,” whose photographs were made typically for book projects.
12
18
“substantial need” beyond the “excessive hype that accompanied the marketing of
this particular return to art as a hand-made expressive object.” 14 Although it is not
the purpose of this study to chronicle all of the exhibitions of the period that
contributed to this phenomenon, it is useful to mention some of the more notable ones
to set the stage for the critical writings that ensued. It will be seen that art
connections between West Germany and North America accelerated in the early
1980s.
Exhibitions of importance to this argument include two precursors in New
York: “New Image Painting,” 1978, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and
“American Painting: The Eighties,” 1979, at The Grey Art Gallery and Study
Center. 15 In Europe, the following exhibitions were of particular significance: the
1980 Venice Biennale; “Westkunst: Zeitgenossische Kunst seit 1939” in Cologne in
1981; “A New Spirit in Painting” in London in 1981; and Documenta 7 in Kassel and
“Zeitgeist” in Berlin, each in 1982. 16 “Expressions: New Art from Germany” was
exhibited in St. Louis in 1983, and traveled to Long Island City, Philadelphia,
Cincinnati, Chicago, Newport Beach and Washington, D.C. 17 “New Figuration:
14
Suzaan Boettger, “Regression in the Service of …,” Art Criticism 2, no. 2 (1986): 57-68, 67. See,
also, Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries, Hunger Nach Bildern: Deutsche Malerei der Gegenwart
(Cologne: DuMont, 1982), a book about West German painting from 1960 to 1982. Nearly one-half of
the images in the book are of works painted between 1980 and 1982.
15
Richard Marshall, New Image Painting (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978); and
Barbara Rose, American Painting, The Eighties: A Critical Interpretation, exh. cat. (New York: Grey
Art Gallery & Study Center, 1979).
16
“Westkunst” included a section titled “Heute,” financed partly by gallery owners, which included the
work of 37 artists. Jeff Wall was represented by Movie Audience (1979), which is comprised of seven
transparencies in three lightboxes. See the review by Richard Armstrong, “‘Heute,’
Westkunst,”Artforum 20, no. 1 (September 1981): 83-86. Wall’s work was not mentioned in the
exhibition catalogue: Laszlo Glozer, Westkunst: Zeitgenossische Kunst seit 1939, exh. cat. (Cologne:
DuMont, 1981).
17
Jack Cowart, ed., Expressions: New Art from Germany, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel, in association
with The Saint Louis Art Museum, 1983). The exhibition included the work of five West German
painters: Georg Baselitz, Jorg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lupertz and A. R. Penck.
19
Contemporary Art from Germany” took place at the Frederick S. Wight Gallery in
Los Angeles in the same year. 18 All of the foregoing exhibitions focused primarily
or exclusively on painting, with an emphasis on West German and American
Neoexpressionism and Italian Transavantgardia. Numerous gallery exhibitions
augmented this phenomenon.
Several writers of the period suggested that there was an element of European
triumphalism in the emphasis on European painting in the exhibitions. Writing of
several French painters, whom she characterized as “just a brushstroke behind their
German and Italian neighbors,” French art critic Catherine Francblin observed:
But whether we applaud or mock we cannot deny—especially upon
returning from the Venice Biennale and Documenta—that the new
figuration has the wind in its sails, and that it is changing the entire art
scene—along with a market that for nearly 20 years had seemed
moribund to everyone. This movement, especially in Germany and
Italy, constitutes a revival of European art, which now reclaims its
place on an international stage previously monopolized by America.
(Emphasis added.) 19
Writing that the London Royal Academy’s “A New Spirit in Painting” was both
“good” and “rotten,” New York critic Roberta Smith said,
Rotten because it seemed to have a hidden agenda—showcasing the
new German figurative expressionism at the expense of both American
and Italian painters in particular….The exhibition’s main goal seemed
to have been to increase the visibility and appreciation of the northern
expressionist tradition in current painting, and to unseat American
painting’s hegemony. 20
18
Donald B. Kuspit, New Figuration: Contemporary Art from Germany, exh. cat. (Los Angeles:
Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983). This exhibition
included works of 15 West German painters, including the five shown in “Expressions: New Art from
Germany.” More than two-thirds of the works in the exhibition were painted after 1976.
19
Catherine Francblin, “Free French,” Art in America 70, no. 8 (September 1982): 128-31, 128.
20
Roberta Smith, “Fresh Paint?” Art in America 69, no. 6 (Summer 1981): 70-79, 71.
20
In a review titled “Bayreuth ’82,” Craig Owens castigated the retrogressive
nature of the art exhibited at Documenta 7, linking it to German Romanticism. He
regarded the German artists who dominated the exhibition as “recycling the entire
German Romantic reserve of folklore, symbolism, myth and cultural heroics,” and,
also, perceived in the selection of artists by exhibition curator Rudi Fuchs an attempt
to unseat American cultural hegemony:
This is, of course, the same cultural baggage that was appropriated by
National Socialist propaganda as evidence of a German national
character, and the rhetoric of redemption that surrounds these painters’
work ultimately boils down to their attempted resurrection and
revalorization of cultural traditions discredited by their association
with fascism….Theirs is the dreamworld of Romantic protest: they
offer (the illusion of) spontaneity, immediacy and irrationality as
alternatives to technical rationalization, the progressive
“Americanization” of postwar German society. 21
As suggested by the foregoing, the widely-observed phenomenon of a return
to figurative painting was chronicled in a frenzy of articles in the art press that
brought into sharp relief the division between those who saw a return to painting as
welcome, and those such as Craig Owens who saw it as a regressive political and
social retreat to historic bourgeois practices. 22 Issues of Art in America, from
Summer 1981 through March 1983, included numerous articles on the painting
21
Craig Owens, “Bayreuth ’82,” Art in America 70, no. 8 (September 1982): 132-39, 191; 134. See,
also, Benjamin Buchloh’s criticism of Documenta 7 in “A Dictionary of Received Ideas: Documenta
7,” October 22 (Fall 1982): 105-26.
22
The postmodernist position that representation in art is an “apparatus of power” and, therefore, never
politically neutral, was set forth by Craig Owens in “Representation, Appropriation & Power,” Art in
America 70, no. 5 (May 1982): 9-21. See, also, Owens, “Honor, Power and the Love of Women,” Art
in America 71, no. 1 (January 1983): 7-13, 11, for his critique of the “Expressionist revival” as
antimodernist and fatalistic. Owens was speaking of the Italian Transavantgarde, German
Neoexpressionism and American artists Julian Schnabel and David Salle. Owens observed the swift
rise of figurative art: “The extraordinary speed with which the pseudo-Expressionists have risen to
prominence indicates that their work, rather than creating new expectations, merely conforms to
existing ones; when ‘the fulfilled expectation becomes the norm of the product,’ however, we have
entered the territory of kitsch.”
21
phenomenon with a focus on European painting. 23 Similarly, issues of Artforum in
1981 and 1982 evidenced the same focus. 24
The journal October was a signal contributor to the discourse on the changes
in art around 1980; the Spring 1981 issue included seminal essays by Benjamin
Buchloh and Douglas Crimp and the conversation between Lifson and SolomonGodeau cited above. 25 In that issue, Annette Michelson wrote an editorial titled “The
Prospect Before Us,” in which she renewed the journal’s commitment to critical,
Marxist-based discourse in the face of shifts in political and economic conditions. 26
Her statement reprised and emphasized the essentially political stance of October and
the degree to which its contributors regarded the election of a conservative
Republican to the American presidency as emblematic of and integrally connected to
23
See, for example: Roberta Smith, “Fresh Paint?”; Elizabeth C. Baker, “The ‘Return’ of European
Art,” Art in America (Special Issue: Europe ’82) 70, no. 8 (September 1982): 5; Donald Kuspit, “Acts
of Aggression: German Painting Today,” Art in America 70, no. 8 (September 1982): 140-51;
Catherine Francblin, “Free French;” Donald Kuspit, “Acts of Aggression: German Painting Today,
Part II,” Art in America 71, no. 1 (January 1983): 90-101, 131-35 ; David Galloway, “Report from
West Germany: A Season of Artistic Détente,” Art in America 71, no. 3 (March 1983): 25-29; Hal
Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” Art in America 71, no. 1 (January 1983): 80-83, 137; Prudence
Carlson, “Report From Amsterdam: Arriving at the ‘80s,” Art in America 71, no. 1 (January 1983), 1924; Joan Simon, “Report from Berlin: ‘Zeitgeist’: the Times & The Place,” Art in America 71, no. 3
(March 1983):, 33-37.
24
See, for example: Stuart Morgan, “Cold Turkey: A New Spirit in Painting,” Artforum 19, no. 8
(April 1981): 46-47; Bazon Brock, “The End of the Avant-Garde? And So the End of Tradition. Notes
on the Present ‘Kulturkampf’ Painting in West Germany,” Artforum 19, no.10 (June 1981): 62-67;
Wolfgang Max Faust, “Du hast keine chance. Nutze sie! Tendencies in Recent German Art,” trans. J.
W. Gabriel, Artforum 20, no. 2 (September 1981): 39; Thomas Lawson, “Last Exit: Painting,”
Artforum 20, no. 2 (October 1981): 40-47; Donald Kuspit, “The New (?) Expressionism: Art as
Damaged Goods,” Artforum 20, no. 3 (November 1981): 47-55; and in Artforum 21, no. 1 (September
1982): 57-75, articles on Documenta 7 by Annelie Pohlen, Kate Linker, Donald Kuspit, Richard Flood
and Edit deAk.
25
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of
Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39-68; and Douglas Crimp, “The
End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 69-86, in which he said: “And, after waiting out the entire
era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance. The appetite for
photography in the past decade has been insatiable. Artists, critics, dealers, curators, and scholars have
defected from their former pursuits in droves to take up this enemy of painting. Photography may have
been invented in 1839, but it was only discovered in the 1970s. (p. 76.) Buchloh’s essay is discussed
in Chapter Two.
26
Annette Michelson, “The Prospect Before Us,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 119-26.
22
shifts in the art world. The editors had staked out their territory in the first issue. 27
The variants on this position, as worked through by Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin
Buchloh, are elucidated in Chapter Two.
It is the contention of this study that the advent of the large-scale color
photograph was coincident with and part of the phenomenon of the burgeoning of
large-scale, figurative artwork in color that was a radical departure from art of the
conceptual period. As suggested by the conversation between Lifson and SolomonGodeau, photophilia, or the new love of photography, involved photography that took
its cues from painting: it was big, pictorial and in color, thus abjuring the abstract,
black-and-white characteristics of earlier so-called art photography. The beginning of
the turn in photography can be seen in the late-seventies work of an artist such as Jeff
Wall, and the early-eighties work of artist Cindy Sherman, who, until that point, had
been a major player in postmodern critique with her untitled film stills (1977-1980).
Sherman’s “Centerfolds,” produced in 1981, moved her art from eight-by-ten inch
black-and-white photographs, to intensely-colored works that were two-by-four feet
in dimension. The significance of Sherman’s move was confirmed by Lisa Phillips:
“They were shocking, seductive, confrontational, and at 2 x 4 feet were among the
largest photographs I had ever witnessed.” 28 The “Centerfolds” were shown in the
fall of 1981 at Metro Pictures, which was then a new New York gallery devoted to
27
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, “About October,” October 1 (Spring
1976): 3-5: “As this issue demonstrates, we will publish writing grounded in presuppositions that are
materialist, or at times idealist. Indeed, the tensions between radical artistic practice and dominant
ideology will be a major subject of inquiry.” The name October is, of course, a reference to Sergei
Eisenstein’s eponymous 1927-28 film, commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Russian
Revolution. According to the editors, “We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in
our century when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were joined in a
manner exemplary and unique.” Ibid., 3.
28
Lisa Phillips, ed., Introduction to Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds (New York: Skarsted Fine Art,
2003).
23
photographically-based art. Commenting upon Sherman’s work in Metro Pictures’
inaugural group exhibition,
reviewer Valentine Tatransky said, “They are glamorous, dramatic self-portraits—and
the more glamorous and dramatic they become, the better they get.” Speaking of the
work of Jack Goldstein, Michael Zwack and Thomas Lawson, he said,
Once they were content simply to abbreviate the photographic; now
their work is more lush, opulent, and—one hesitates to use this term,
because it is the wrong word to use, but at least it expresses what is
new in their work—painterly. 29
The Picture
The large, visually authoritative photograph marks a rupture with much art
that preceded it: it places the viewer in front of a single, large picture. The term
“picture” implies that the image is legible. By legible, it is meant that a viewer is able
to discern from everyday experience what the photograph is a picture of, irrespective
of whether one can recognize or chooses to infer any deeper implications, or whether
one can tell that the image was staged by the artist or occurred naturally.
The concept of the “picture” will be threaded through this study not just
because it is a commonly used and presumably readily understood term, but because
it figures prominently in the terminology used by Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter in
speaking about their art and their artistic goals. In addition, the term “picture” might
be accepted as a synonym for the term “tableau” that is discussed below, which has
important art historical references, and is used as well by Jeff Wall in describing his
praxis. First, however, it is important to examine how the term picture figured in art
29
Valentine Tatransky, “The Opening of Metro Pictures,” FlashArt no.101 (January-February 1981):
49.
24
historical discourse during the later years of Conceptual Art and just before big
pictures emerged.
The Postmodern Picture
In 1979, Douglas Crimp published an essay titled “Pictures,” 30 a revision of a
catalogue essay he had published in 1977, in which he described the
photographically-based aesthetic strategies of five artists who were, in his view,
committed to “radical innovation.” Using photography, film and performance in
combination with traditional mediums, 31 the most salient characteristic of those
artists’ work was recognizable images. Crimp asserted the elasticity of the term
“picture,” saying that it lacks specificity to any particular medium, and it functions as
a verb as well as a noun, in that it may refer to the mental process of “picturing” as
well as to the creation of an aesthetic object.32 While Crimp’s essay “Pictures”
described and attempted to categorize a group of photographically-based practices of
which Crimp approved, when read closely in the context of the period, it
foreshadowed the emergence of a kind of “picture” in both photography and painting
that he abjured. His writings of 1979 to 1982 are given emphasis here because, taken
together, they reveal critical issues in the discourse of art history in the very period
that is the focus of this study.
30
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75-88. This essay was a revision and
elaboration of an eponymous catalogue essay that Crimp wrote for an exhibition he organized in 1977
for Artists Space in New York. Douglas Crimp, Pictures, exh. cat. (New York: Committee for the
Visual Arts, 1977). See, also, Douglas Crimp, “About Pictures,” FlashArt, no. 88-89 (March-April,
1979): 34-35. Artists Space reinstalled the 1977 exhibition during the summer of 2001, to the extent
that original works were available. See the reactions of David Rimanelli and Scott Rothkopf in “’80s
Redux: ‘Pictures’ Reframed,” Artforum 40, no. 2 (October 2001): 130-34. Hereinafter, references to
“Pictures” are to Crimp’s 1979 essay.
31
The use of “mediums” as the plural of medium is discussed in Chapter Two.
32
Crimp, “Pictures,” 75.
25
In “Pictures,” Crimp described the “structures of signification” utilized by
Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine and Troy Brauntuch,
and explored the variety of ways in which those artists staged pictures without
resorting to traditional painting or sculpture. Crimp elucidated the focus on
temporality and duration in this art and its disinterest in “the material condition of the
signs through which meaning is generated.” 33 He then named the “strategies of
signification” that he had described--quotation, excerptation, framing and staging—
saying that they represented radical new approaches to medium. In fact, several
mediums were sometimes used in a given work.
Crimp’s essay was exploratory—one senses that he was searching for a way to
define or simply describe new art practices that he was observing among some young
New York artists. 34 As the 1970s waned, Minimal and Conceptual Art had
essentially run their courses. The production of recognizable images, or pictures, had
not been the focus of those critical categories. Minimal Art had eschewed the image
altogether, and Conceptual Art had produced socially- and politically-oriented works
often combining snapshot-like pictures with text to impart messages and circumvent
the art establishment. What Crimp was seeing and describing seemed different to
him. He saw in the complex array of tactical approaches a “reinvestment in the
pictorial image.” For example, in Jack Goldstein’s endlessly repeated film loop of
33
Ibid., 87.
At the same time, he castigated “New Image Painting,” an exhibition mentioned above that the
Whitney Museum of American Art had mounted a year earlier, as a futile attempt to preserve the
“integrity” of painting as a modernist aesthetic category, and, with it, the institution of the museum.
That exhibition focused on what Crimp viewed as the works’ “least important characteristic:
recognizable images.” Ibid., 88. Yet, his essay, starting with its title, is very much about art that
produces images. See, also, David Salle’s negative assessment of most of the artworks included in the
exhibition: David Salle, “New Image Painting,” FlashArt, no. 88-89 (March-April 1979): 40-41.
34
26
fencers, what is apprehended is a staged image. 35 In Robert Longo’s layered
photographic images based ultimately on a film fragment of another artist, the central
image is that of a “three-part tableau performance.” 36 In the work of Troy Brauntuch,
an image of Hitler asleep in his Mercedes is fetishized by the manner of its
presentation.” 37 According to Crimp,
The picture is an object of desire, the desire for the signification that is
known to be absent. The expression of that desire to make the picture
yield a reality that it pretends to contain is the subject of the work of
Troy Brauntuch. But, it must be emphasized, his is no private
obsession. It is an obsession that is in the very nature of our
relationship to pictures. 38
The work that Crimp chose to address was, by his definition, postmodernist
because of its radical approach to medium:
If it had been characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art
that they were topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of
artworks in order to determine their structures, then it has now become
necessary to think of description as a stratigraphic activity. Those
processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that
constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate
uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in
search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification:
underneath each picture there is always another picture. 39 (Emphasis
added.)
Crimp’s exploration is emphasized here because it came at a moment that was
critical in the shift to the big picture that is the subject of this study. Irrespective of
the fact that the postmodernist approaches of the five artists he described used
photographically-based materials in complex ways that, as he suggested, produced an
experience of duration and interacted psychologically with viewers by invoking
35
Crimp, “Pictures,” 80.
Ibid., 83.
37
Ibid., 84.
38
Ibid., 83.
39
Ibid., 87.
36
27
anticipation and memory, the point is that those works produced images. Crimp’s
title “Pictures” for his 1977 exhibition and essay point to this, and his text repeatedly
uses the terms “picture” and “image.”
The moment at which Crimp wrote “Pictures” was one in which the concept
of photography as and in art was undergoing strenuous examination. Crimp soon
produced a series of essays in which he explored the role of photography in
Postmodern Art, emphasizing its essential role in an assault on the institution of the
museum and the concurrent demise of painting. 40 Crimp traced the beginning of this
assault to Robert Rauschenberg’s early sixties reproduction techniques of
silkscreening and transfer drawing:
Through reproductive technology postmodernist art dispenses with the
aura. The fantasy of a creating subject gives way to the frank
confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of
already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and
presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are
undermined. 41
Crimp’s essays had as objectives not only the ambitious goal of describing
and defining postmodern art as he saw it, but of convincing readers that painting and
the institution of the museum were elements of an outmoded modernist episteme that
sustained the dominant bourgeois culture. He castigated two recent painting
exhibitions, “New Image Painting” mentioned earlier, and “American Painting: The
40
“On the Museum’s Ruins,” October 13 (Summer 1980): 41-58; “The Photographic Activity of
Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91-101; “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring
1981): 69-86; “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” Parachute 22 (Spring 1981): 32-37.
See, also, Douglas Crimp, “Appropriating Appropriation,” in Paula Marincola, ed. Image Scavengers:
Photography (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1982), 27-34.
By 1982, then, Crimp could observe that the oppositional force of those kinds of photographic
strategies was dissipating as museums appropriated them as another object category. These essays are
collected, with others, in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
41
Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” 56.
28
Eighties,” held in the fall of 1979, as Crimp sarcastically put it, to “demonstrate the
miraculous resurrection of painting.” 42
At the same time that he was criticizing painting, Crimp lamented the
application of connoisseurship to traditional photographs by focusing on rarity of age,
the vintage print and the photograph’s style, all said to derive from the photographer’s
unique vision. Crimp saw this as the creation of an “aura” for photography. 43
Although he did not identify particular recent museum exhibitions of photography,
his references to “the photographer’s …eye, his unique vision,” and “the mirrors and
the windows” suggest that he had in mind some of curator John Szarkowski’s
exhibitions of photography at the Museum of Modern Art during the previous 15
years. 44
42
Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 96. Crimp quoted Barbara Rose’s catalogue
essay in American Painting: The Eighties, saying that “the return to a painting of personal expression”
in all of its various guises “is utterly conformist on one point: its hatred of photography.” Ibid. He
reprised his argument against painting in “The End of Painting,” 77, where Crimp criticized the
“historicist” view of painting which invests painting’s brush strokes with human presence: “It is a
metaphysics of the human touch.”
43
Ibid. The term “aura” is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technical Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, 19351938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and
Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2002), 101-33. Crimp’s adoption
of this term in respect of photography-as-art drew a direct analogy to the traditional view of painting
vilified by Benjamin in his 1936 essay. Thus, Crimp was saying that photographs, which are
inherently reproducible, were being treated by curators and connoisseurs by the mid-1970s as unique
and valuable works of art. This was a reversal of the process of depleting aura, a role that reproductive
photographic practices had played since Rauschenberg and Warhol silkscreened pre-existing images in
a contestation of the “uniqueness of the work of art.” For Crimp, the other attempt “to recuperate the
auratic” that arose during the mid-1970s was the return to expressionist painting: “By the mid-1970s
another, more serious symptom of the museum’s crisis appeared…the various attempts to recuperate
the auratic. These attempts are manifest in two, contradictory phenomena: the resurgence of
expressionist painting and the triumph of photography-as-art.” Ibid. From the vantage point of 1980,
Crimp linked what he saw as two retrogressive moves that diminished the progress achieved by the
critical photographic practices that he had described in “Pictures.”
44
John Szarkowski, The Photographer and the American Landscape (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1963); John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966);
and John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1978. Crimp’s view of Szarkowski’s exhibitions and related catalogue essays was
confirmed in his essay, “The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject,” in which he decried the
reduction of photography to an art form with “essential” qualities as it entered the museum, and the
29
Crimp’s essays serve to highlight the widespread attention that photography
was attracting in art journals in this period as art historians and critics endeavored to
understand and assimilate the “postmodern activities” of which Crimp was speaking
and the changing roles of photography. Several contemporary art periodicals devoted
entire issues to the phenomenon of photography in art in the late 1970s and early
1980s, 45 an indication that photography was generally seen to be in a state of flux and
of rising importance. It is the contention of this study that Douglas Crimp was both
insightful and prescient in his focus on photography from 1977 to 1982. Photography
was changing, indeed, and viewed from the vantage point of 25 years later, Crimp’s
essays read as dire warnings. Even in 1980, Crimp observed two distinct trends
moving in opposite directions:
That we are now experiencing the “decay of the aura” that Benjamin
predicted can be understood not only in these positive terms of what
has replaced it, but also in the many desperate attempts to recuperate it
by reviving the style and rhetoric of expressionism. This tendency is,
needless to say, particularly strong in the marketplace, but also in
museum exhibitions. 46
By 1982, he saw that the museum was categorizing and assimilating the work he had
hoped would circumvent it, but, even worse, artists whose work he had valorized
were adapting their art to the museum. 47 By 1982, of course, the large-scale color
treatment of a photographer such as Ansel Adams as an artistic genius, much in the way painters
traditionally had been discussed.
45
See, for example, FlashArt International (February-March, 1975); Studio International (JulyAugust, 1975); Artforum 15 (September 1976); October 5 (Summer 1978); and Art Journal 41 (Spring
1981).
46
Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” 56, n. 17.
47
Douglas Crimp, “Appropriating Appropriation.” Crimp warned that certain artists who had
previously used appropriative photographic strategies in critical modes had begun to appropriate their
own work by converting to a style or form that fit “the museum’s desire for appropriated images.” He
cited as examples Richard Prince’s “extreme mediation of the advertising image,” in contrast to his
earlier use of degraded unaltered pictures, and Cindy Sherman’s large-scale color close-up
photographs of herself as “star,” as opposed to her earlier critical small, black-and-white film stills. To
Crimp, such works augmented, rather than disrupted, the institutional discourse. Ibid., 34. This point
30
photography at issue in this study had arrived on the scene, joining the expressionist
painting discussed above.
The Tableau—an Earlier History
The conventional definition of “tableau” is, simply, “a graphic description or
representation: PICTURE.” 48 Given the revival of this term in the critical discourse
of the late twentieth century, it becomes necessary to the current study to look to the
eighteenth century in order to ground consideration of the tableau within the first
serious exploration of its importance to Western painting.
In his exploration of the relationship between painting and beholder in the
mid-eighteenth century, Michael Fried has proposed that the anti-Rococo movement
of that period served to re-establish the hierarchy of genres and the supremacy of
history painting and, in so doing, established the supremacy of the tableau. He
defines the tableau as “the portable and self-sufficient picture that could be taken in at
a glance, as opposed to the ‘environmental,’ architecture-dependent, often episodic or
allegorical project that could not.”49 Fried considers the articulation of the emphasis
on unity and instantaneousness in writings of the period to have marked “an epoch in
the prehistory of modern painting (or perhaps I should say modern pictorial
thought).” 50
presaged the one made five years later by Abigail Solomon-Godeau in “Living with Contradictions,”
quoted above, in which she described the circulation of postmodernist discourses between advertising
and the media, on the one hand, and postmodernist photography on the other.
48
Mirriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition (Springfield, MA: Mirriam Webster, 1994),
1198.
49
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 89. Although Fried italicizes the word “tableau” in observation of
its French origin, I will not do so in this study.
50
Ibid., 89.
31
Looking to the period when the tableau form first emerged and to the
discussions of that pictorial form by eighteenth-century critics and theorists is helpful
to an understanding of the nature of the photographs that began to appear around
1980. 51 As Fried has said, those writings form the prehistory of modern pictorial
thought, and modern pictorial thought is central to this study. For example, Jeff Wall
has applied the term “tableau” to his own work, and therefore it has currency in the
discussion of certain contemporary photography. Moreover, Wall linked a number of
his early works to particular nineteenth-century French paintings. 52
In his Conversations on “The Natural Son,” a 1760 treatise on the theater,
Denis Diderot urged the consideration of certain kinds of painting as models for
convincing theatrical action, and suggested looking to the tableau. 53 Diderot defined
the word “tableau” as “an arrangement of these characters on stage, so natural and so
true that faithfully rendered by a painter, it would please me on a canvas.” 54 In his
view, unities of action, time and place in a work of visual art resulted in a convincing,
persuasive and intelligible picture or scene. The goal was to inform, attract and hold
the viewer’s attention from the first glance.55
Two separate but related characteristics of the tableau as described by those
eighteenth-century writers are particularly important to this study: singularity and
51
It should be stated that the theories of Diderot and others in the mid-eighteenth century concerning
the nature of the tableau and the characteristics that made the tableau arresting and persuasive are
much more complex than described herein and involve the nature of the subject matter depicted.
Fried’s arguments concerning the evolving nature of the relationship between painting and beholder
during the period leading to the advent of David include a focus on subject matter as well as form, and
revived the issue of genre and the supremacy of history painting. Both the form of the tableau and the
hierarchy of genre are integral to Fried’s concepts of absorption and theatricality.
52
Examples include The Destroyed Room (1978), Picture for Women (1979), Stereo (1980), A Woman
and her Doctor (1980-81), and Backpack (1981-1982), discussed further in Chapter Two.
53
Fried., 78.
54
Denis Diderot, “Conversations on The Natural Son.”
55
Fried, quoting Anne-Claude-Philippe Caylus, Ibid., 88.
32
intelligibility. First, the singular and independent nature of the tableau, as opposed, in
Fried’s words, to the architecture-dependent, often episodic works from which it is
distinguished, permitted the picture to be apprehended quickly. A tableau does not
have to be considered in concert with a series of related images, or visually
distinguished from the wall or ceiling on which it is painted. It is a separate portable
object.
British critic Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, writing in 1712, described
what he called the “Tablature,” or “picture:”
Before we enter on the examination of our historical sketch, it may be
proper to remark, that by the word Tablature (for which we have yet
no name in English, besides the general one of picture) we denote,
according to the original word Tabula, a work not only distinct from a
mere portraiture, but from all those wilder sorts of painting which are
in a manner absolute, and independent; such as the paintings in fresco
upon the walls, the ceilings, the staircases, the cupola’s, and other
remarkable places either of churches or palaces….But it is then that in
painting we may give to any particular work the name of Tablature,
when the work is in reality “a single piece, comprehended in one view,
and formed according to one single intelligence, meaning, or design;
which constitutes a real whole, by a mutual and necessary relation of
its parts, the same as of the members in a natural body.” 56
In addition to the independent nature of the tableau—its portability and lack of
dependence on placement within an architectural framework or with other related
works—the tableau’s intelligibility was paramount. Knowing that a painting would
be seen by a wide spectrum of the public at the Salons, Diderot said, “A composition,
which must be exposed to the eyes of a crowd of all sorts of beholders, will be faulty
56
Anthony [Ashley Cooper, Third] Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Notion of the Historical Draught or
Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules,” in Second Characters, or The Language of Forms, ed.
Benjamin Rand (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 32. See, also, Shaftesbury, “Sensus Communis,
an Essay on the Freedom of Whit and Humour,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,
ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66: “However, [a painting] if
it be beautiful and carries truth, must be a whole by itself, complete, independent and withal as great
and comprehensive as [the painter] can make it.”
33
if it is not intelligible to a man of simple common sense.” It was important to those
writers that a work be easily and quickly understood by the viewer, a standard that
Fried has termed “radical intelligibility.” 57
Singularity and intelligibility are hallmarks of the photographic works at the
heart of this study. They stand on their own and command the wall; their mere scale
commands attention. These pictures are self-sufficient in that they are not elements
of a series, nor are they integrated into architecture. As large as they may be, they are
portable. One does not have to consult other images in order to consider or interpret
them. As for intelligibility, a person of “simple common sense” can readily
understand by looking at large pictures by Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky or Thomas
Struth, for example, what they depict. Deeper meanings and historic references may
not be readily apparent and may require extended looking or further research, but, at
first glance, these photographs are intelligible. 58
57
Fried, 90.
The panorama and diorama, nineteenth-century inventions of public spectacle, might constitute a
mid-point, or intermediate touchstone, between the eighteenth-century tableau and the large, latetwentieth-century photograph. Installed in specially-constructed buildings and illuminated from above
by daylight, or lighted from behind by candles and lamps, these large paintings on canvas or
transparent cloth satisfied a desire to view pictures of current events, literary scenes and distant lands.
The public viewing of panoramas and dioramas, in particular, was akin to the public nature of viewing
in galleries and museums of the large-scale pictures at issue in this study. See, for example, Barbara
Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a
Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 90-102; Richard D. Altick, The Shows of
London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1978); Arthur T. Gill, “The
London Diorama,” History of Photography 1, no. 1 (January 1977): 31-36; and Ton Rombout, ed., The
Panorama Phenomenon (The Hague: B.V. Panorama Mesdag, 2006). The phenomenon of backlighting can be traced to the Eidophusikon of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a stage set designer in
London in the 1770s. With movable transparent painted screens, he produced theatrical spectacles by
shining lamps from behind as well as in front to vary the times of day and the seasons. The
Eidophusikon was a stage, or box, six feet high, ten feet wide and eight feet deep in which he presented
series of scenes in a theater in his home for spectators who paid admission. See, Richard D. Altick,
“The Eidophusikon,” in The Shows of London, 117-27.
58
34
The Contemporary Picture as Tableau
Roland Barthes’s 1973 essay, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” 59 can be read as
forging a link between the eighteenth-century concept of painting as tableau, and the
prominence of that format in late-twentieth-century photography. Writing before the
advent of the large-scale photographs at issue in this study and the concomitant return
to figurative painting, Barthes was interested in the concept of the tableau in theater,
film and literature as something cut out from a greater whole:
The tableau (pictorial, theatrical, literary) is a pure cut-out segment
with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything
that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while
everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into
light, into view. Such demiurgic discrimination implies high quality of
thought: the tableau is intellectual, it has something to say (something
moral, social)….The epic scene in Brecht, the shot in Eisenstein are so
many tableaux; they are scenes which are laid out…which answer
perfectly to that dramatic unity theorized by Diderot…. 60
Barthes refers somewhat obliquely to two concerns of Douglas Crimp and
others who have focused on some of the political implications of representational or
traditional pictorial art: first, the idea that in theater and cinema (and photography)
“things are always seen from somewhere;” and, second, “a fetishist subject is required
to cut out the tableau.” 61 The inferences are that a tableau, or picture, has a point of
view, meaning that it was selected from among many alternatives, and that
someone—“a fetishist subject”--has made the selection based on what he wants to
say. According to Barthes, “This point of meaning is always the Law: law of society,
59
Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 69-78.
60
Ibid., 70-71.
61
Ibid. 76.
35
law of struggle, law of meaning.” 62 These statements suggest that an artist presents
to a viewer a social or moral meaning. This is, after all, an idea embedded in the very
nature of the tableau as discussed by Diderot, in that it has to be intelligible, or in
Fried’s words, “radically intelligible.” The presentation of meaning by means of a
tableau, then, is a presentation of a “law,” which is a presentation of or from a
particular point of view or position of power. The transmission of meaning from the
subject position of an artist within a comprehensible or “totalizing” picture came to
be a highly criticized art practice in the postmodern period in the belief that it directs
a viewer to think in a prescribed way.
Barthes’s discussion of the tableau in connection with Brecht and Eisenstein
can be read as a criticism or warning about the power of the tableau. As discussed in
Chapter Three, the theories of Bertolt Brecht figure prominently in some of Jeff
Wall’s work, and represent a conscious attempt on Wall’s part to make the work
thought-provoking and socially critical. The charge that the works are “totalizing”
has been a criticism of Wall’s work, as will be seen.
More recently, another French theorist has enlisted the concept of the tableau
in his extensive writings on photography in general and Jeff Wall in particular,
without the political implications implied by Barthes. In attempting to define the
nature of the big pictures that emerged within the world of fine art in the late 1970s,
and writing primarily since 1989, Jean-François Chevrier has offered the notion of the
r
62
Ibid., 76-77. Barthes goes on to say, with respect to Brecht and Eisenstein, “In the long run, it is the
Law of the Party which cuts out the epic scene, the filmic shot; it is this Law which looks, frames,
focusses, enunciates. Once again Eisenstein and Brecht rejoin Diderot (promoter of bourgeois
domestic tragedy, as his two successors were the promoters of a socialist art.)” Ibid., 77.
36
tableau. 63 In choosing this term—one that has been applied to painting since the
eighteenth century, and is strongly associated with ambitious French painting of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the advent of Modernism-Chevrier implicitly connects photography of the post-conceptual period to premodernist painting. 64
After having observed post-conceptual photography for a decade, Chevrier
first used the term “picture-form” in describing the large photographs that had
emerged during the 1980s. 65 By 1991, he had adopted the concept of the tableau:
This notion . . . means first of all a demarcated frontal plane. The
plane’s demarcation is traditionally marked by a frame. Its frontality
demands and presupposes the confrontation of the viewer. The tableau
is a form inherited from painting which developed progressively, when
63
Chevrier’s essays have appeared primarily in catalogues for photography exhibitions. In addition to
“Shadow and Light,” referred to above, see, also, “Les aventures de la forme tableau dans l’histoire de
la photographie,” in Photo Kunst Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren=Du XXeme Siecle, Aller et Retour, exh. cat.
(Stuttgart: Graphische Sammlung, Staatsgalerie, and Edition Cantz, 1989), 47-81; “The Adventures of
the Picture Form in the History of Photography (1989),” trans. Michael Gilson, in The Last Picture
Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, ed. Douglas Fogle, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 2003), in which Chevrier’s essay is a “slightly abridged translation” of his essay in Photo
Kunst; Chevrier and James Lingwood, “Another Objectivity,” in Un’ altra obiettivita Another
objectivity, exh. cat. (Milan: Idea Books, 1989); “Play, Drama, Enigma,” trans. Brian Holmes, in Jeff
Wall, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; Paris:
Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1995); “A Painter of Modern Life: An Interview between Jeff
Wall and Jean-François Chevrier,” in Jeff Wall: Figures & Places—Selected Works from 1978-2000,
ed. Rolf Lauter (Munich: Prestel; and Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 2001); “Conversation
between Jeff Wall and Jean-François Chevrier,” in Essais et entretiens, 1984-2001 Jeff Wall, ed. JeanFrançois Chevrier, (Paris: Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts, 2001); “The Interiorized
Academy: Interview with Jean-Francois Chevrier 1990,” and “The Spectres of the Everyday,” trans.
Brian Holmes, in Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, Boris Groys and Jean-François Chevrier
[hereinafter referred to as “de Duve et al.”], Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon, 2002), 104-110 and 164-89;
“The Metamorphosis of Place,” in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonne’ 1978-2004, ed. Theodora Vischer
and Heidi Naef (Basel: Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, 2005), 13-31 [hereinafter referred to as
“JWCR”]; “The Tableau and the Document of Experience,” in Click Doubleclick: The Documentary
Factor, ed. Thomas Weski, exh. cat. (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung and Walther Konig, 2006),
51-61; and Jeff Wall (Paris: Hazan, 2006).
64
This connection to history is emblematic of Chevrier’s view that there has been no break with
modernism and the pre-modernism of the eighteenth century, and those connections between
contemporary photography and art historical precedents should be recognized and studied, but not
criticized as postmodern “pastiche.” This view will be seen to coincide with that of Jeff Wall with
regard to his works that reference earlier works of art.
65
Chevrier, “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography (1989),” 115, 116. In
the Introduction to Another Objectivity, Chevrier and Lingwood use the terms “picture” and “image as
picture” repeatedly in characterizing the photographic art made since 1980 included in the exhibition.
37
painting, as flat image, distinguished itself from the three-dimensional
object (sculpted, modeled, in relief) and when as an autonomous object
it further differentiated itself from the mural surface (to which the
fresco belongs). 66
Having described the tableau in purely formal and derivative terms—a
demarcated frontal plane inherited from painting--Chevrier more closely links
photography to that tradition by emphasizing the photograph’s autonomy:
The tableau is useful essentially because it actualizes the recorded
image and accords it the visual authority of a frontal plane, at the level
of the human body (the viewer’s body); it contradicts the frenetic and
blind circulation of media images and it gives to the photographic
image the autonomy of a work of art….The tableau remains essentially
the best model of the artwork’s autonomy at the end of the twentieth
century (because it initially cut the painted image off from its
functional link with a specific place). 67
The autonomy of which Chevrier speaks recapitulates Fried’s point (following
Shaftesbury, Diderot and Barthes) that the tableau marked a break from “architecturedependent” art. It conveys the sense that the photographic tableau is an isolated
object that cuts into, or disrupts, the “frenetic and blind circulation of media images,”
which one could argue comprise the frescoes of the present day. Today’s media
images, of course, are photographic, circulating in print, on television, in film, on the
internet, on cell phones, and, essentially, everywhere one looks.
The tableau arrests the attention of the viewer. Chevrier’s reference to the
level of the human body implies that the work must be of or at least relate to human
scale, which would contribute to its “visual authority.” Speaking of the photographs
of Thomas Struth, for example, he says, “…Struth’s compositions cannot be looked
at, page after page, as images in a book. They need the wall, they call for an
66
67
Chevrier, “Shadow and Light,” 16.
Ibid., 17.
38
experience of confrontation on the part of the viewer. Like a tableau they need space,
they must be considered from a distance.” 68
In describing the tableau solely in terms of its formal means of presentation,
scale and authority, Chevrier ignores subject matter, and thereby distinguishes
himself from his eighteenth-century predecessor Diderot, for whom the tableau was
necessarily a scene of human activity. But if the tableau of the eighteenth century
was one apparent historical precedent for the development of modernist painting, we
know with hindsight that subject matter in painting evolved and evaporated during the
ensuing two centuries.
Chevrier distinguishes the photographic tableau that emerged around 1980
from photographic forms prevalent during the late 1960s and 1970s, such as those
considered by Crimp. For conceptual artists, the typically black-and-white and often
amateurish photograph was a document, often combined with text and exhibited in
open-ended series; it sometimes functioned as a means of experimenting with and
demonstrating human perception. 69 The conceptual art photograph was not an object
before which one would pause, did not face the viewer at the level of the body, and
had no real visual authority. The tableau is a singular work, neither visually nor
conceptually connected to any other. 70
68
Ibid., 15. See, also, Chevrier, “The Tableau and the Document of Experience,” 51: “The tableau
presents itself as a frontal plane with clear borders. Its frontal nature means that the viewer is
confronted by the tableau, stands opposite it in a posture of contemplation. The tableau reflects back a
response at the stature of the viewer; it sets up an implicit relationship between the viewer and the
image of his own body. It is an anthropological form of art, in the sense that it establishes the vertical
stature of the human body within the domain of artistic representations.”
69
Chevrier and Lingwood, Introduction to Another Objectivity, 12.
70
It is noted that some artists’ projects, particularly those emanating from the Düsseldorf Art Academy
since the late seventies, such as those of Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer and Thomas Struth, include
numerous photographic images of similar objects and sites in various global locations. Each image
effectively stands on its own, however, in its relationship with the viewer, and viewing the entire
39
Chevrier’s earlier-cited observation that beginning in the 1980s, photography
changed notably in terms of its physical enlargement and adoption of the tableau
form, thus moving it into the realm of “high” art, suggests that photography had to
make a backward move--to the format of pre-modernist painting—in order to become
part of the long history of Modernism. He asserts that “a continuous round trip from
the present to the past is therefore, to my mind, the sine qua non for a new historical
and critical lucidity….” 71
Chevrier’s Theoretical Approach
“Another Objectivity,” Chevrier’s 1989 essay with James Lingwood, and
“Shadow and Light” (1991) together constitute a statement of his fundamental thesis
about contemporary photography, and are elements of a series of essays on the history
of photography and the nature of recent photography. Those essays were exploratory,
as was Crimp’s writing of ten years earlier. In stark contrast to Crimp, however,
Chevrier approaches contemporary photography from a historical perspective by
reciting the history of the medium in art, and displays a bias against Conceptual Art
and art produced in New York or the United States. 72
project is not necessary for any individual image to be intelligible. But see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“Thomas Struth’s Archive,” in Thomas Struth: Photographs, exh. cat. (Chicago: Renaissance Society,
University of Chicago, 1990), 5-11, in which Buchloh criticizes the architectural photography of
Thomas Struth for its failure to depict the conditions of social existence, but then recuperates it
because it constitutes an archive of similar scenes in different world cities. By implication, similar
photographic works that do not form an archive would fail.
71
Chevrier, “Shadow and Light,” 14. Chevrier decries the “dogmatic categories and mechanical
genealogies which have organized (and limited) the definition of contemporary art as they have that of
photography.” Ibid., 15. This forms part of his argument that in the United States, the notion of
contemporary art too often does not permit looking back at history to contextualize such art with both
European and American art of the past.
72
The artists whose works are included in exhibitions curated by Chevrier rarely include those from
the United States. On the other hand, Canadian Jeff Wall is usually included. See “Another
Objectivity,” “Click Doubleclick,” and “Photo-Kunst.” Repeated attention is given to artists from
Düsseldorf, Paris and Vancouver.
40
In “Another Objectivity,” Chevrier brought together 11 artists whose
photographic works are quite diverse. 73 He lists criteria that distinguish these works
from their conceptual predecessors in a way that makes them the obverse of the
earlier ones. First, they are singular, by which Chevrier means that they are original
images, as opposed to being re-photographed, and, thus, they are produced from “a
confrontation with an actual reality;” they include no montage or collage; there is no
text; there is no rigorous seriality; there is singularity of image, in that there is a
unique central or frontal motif; some are unique prints as opposed to editions; in
staged works there is a central fact or gesture; and there is no “purist aesthetic or
reduction.” 74 Finally, “each image exists, isolated, in its frame.”
The second essential characteristic of this photography is the specificity of
image as object and picture. In this regard, Chevrier disclaims the importance of the
medium per se. For him, the image is the new objective reality; the artists “insist
therefore on a descriptive and verifiable reference to a motif (or subject) whose nature
is heterogeneous to the image—that is to say, precisely, objective.” 75 The large
format is part of this logic: “it is a means of accentuating the importance of the
actuality as picture and not…an opportunistic adaptation made for the hierarchical
demands of the market or the spaces of the contemporary museum.” 76
Chevrier describes the products of the “new perceptual opening” that he
observed in 1980 when creativity returned:
73
Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hannah Collins, John Coplans, Gunther Forg, Jean-Louis
Garnell, Craigie Horsfield, Suzanne Lafont, Thomas Struth, Patrick Tosani and Jeff Wall.
74
Chevrier, Another Objectivity, 31.
75
Ibid., 34.
76
Ibid., 35.
41
A transformation has however taken place in the last ten years or so in
Europe (a little later than in the United States.) Subjectivity remains
the dominant criterion, but it is affirmed less through the specific
properties of photography than through procedures borrowed from
other art forms, in particular painting and theatre.77
This is a dismissal of the photography of Conceptual Art, and Chevrier states that this
new work is “beyond the oppositions of 1960-1980.” He credits Christian Boltanski
and Gerhard Richter with “reconstituting the possibility of the picture, painted or
photographed, within the modern tradition.” 78
“Another Objectivity” is a narrative history of photography from 1960 to
1989, leading up to the emergence of a “new objectivity” that emerged from the
conceptual period. He is directly and indirectly critical of the artists of whom Crimp
had written (with the partial exception of Cindy Sherman), and clearly dismisses the
notion of Postmodernism as a break with Modernism. Crimp’s re-photographers, for
example, had done nothing new according to Chevrier, because both Robert
Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol had incorporated pre-existing photographic imagery.
To Chevrier, postmodern photography, which he links to New York, had become
exhausted and ineffective, its attitudes of critical intervention inadequate. Notably,
however, he refers several times to the possibility of art’s offering “sufficient
resistance to the equalization of images produced by the culture industry.” 79 But
rather than oppose the culture industry with the deskilled, amateurish photographs of
Conceptual Art, through this new work, with its “specific image-pictures, a dimension
of experience is reconstructed to stand against the banalizing and reductive effects
77
Ibid., 27-28.
Ibid., 23.
79
Ibid., 35. The origin of the term “culture industry” is addressed in Chapter Three.
78
42
produced by the culture industry…. They propose a model of actuality and produce a
lucid beauty.” 80
Chevrier offers no explanation of the transition from amateurish, conceptual
photographic art to the tableau, aside from the reference to the “exhaustion” of the art
of the late 1960s and 1970s. Having identified conceptual photography with New
York, Chevrier nearly excludes United States artists from his exhibitions and essays
in favor of artists from Düsseldorf, Paris and Vancouver. 81 He professes no
description that would link the varied practices of the 11 artists included, aside from
the criteria outlined above. All of those criteria are traits that serve to distinguish this
art from conceptual photography, with the singular, perhaps most important, criterion
being their production “from a confrontation with ‘actual’ reality, an aspect of which
has been fixed (arrested) by the action of recording.” 82 Ironically, this would seem to
exclude the work of Jeff Wall, whose transparencies of the 1980s were often staged.
Although Chevrier denies the importance or specificity of the medium of this
new photography, the characteristics he ascribes to an art that constitutes a single
image produced from “an actual reality” that is designed to oppose the images
produced by the culture industry would seem to require the medium of photography.
He asserts that the critical criterion of this photography is experience, as distinct from
perception, which was the critical criterion of conceptual photography. If this work is
to provide experience, it is impossible to imagine painting as an alternative. Chevrier
80
Ibid., 37.
The exceptions are Robert Adams and John Coplans, who was born in London but has conducted his
career in the United States.
82
Ibid., 31.
81
43
appears to be working to establish the new photography of the 1980s as an art that
stands apart from and contradicts “the blind circulation of media images.”
The cultural opposition that Chevrier claims for large-scale photography is
unconvincing, in comparison to the opposition that writers such as Douglas Crimp
claimed for conceptual photography. Crimp and his colleagues were unalterably
opposed to contemporary painting and the museum as it had historically evolved, and
valorized postmodern photographic strategies utilizing multiple mediums in the (vain)
hope that they could confound the art establishment. Chevrier’s terminology would
sound highly retrogressive to Crimp, as would be the intelligible photographs that
Chevrier describes. He claims no connection to the avant-garde theories of the first
decades of the twentieth century, eschewing the goal of educating the viewer in favor
of providing an experience. The single image, the requirement of a viewing distance,
and the absence of rupture or montage would seem to turn the photograph of the
1980s into a contemporary version of nineteenth-century painting. In Chevrier’s
concept, artists using photography had regained their authority, subjectivity and
creativity by drawing upon painting and theater.
This study grants to Jean-
François Chevrier significant attention because of his extensive writings on post-1980
photography in general, and, in particular, his many essays about and published
interviews with Jeff Wall. 83 There is a strong convergence of views between
Chevrier and Wall on the importance of the tableau format and the exhaustion of
conceptual strategies for photography. Yet, as is explored in Chapter Three, Wall’s
83
For example, Chevrier’s Essais et Entretiens: 1984-2001; Jeff Wall is an edited collection of 21
essays and interviews by, about and of Wall.
44
work was in the 1980s, and continues to be, about much more than the presentation of
images that provide experiences.
Jeff Wall’s Pictures
Since the 1990s, Jeff Wall has enlisted terminology quite similar to that of
Chevrier to describe his photographic practice, to distinguish it from earlier
conceptual photography (in which he participated and about which he has written),
and to grapple with the essential nature of the photograph. He interchanges the terms
“picture” and “tableau:”
The Western Picture is, of course that tableau, that independently
beautiful depiction and composition that derives from the
institutionalization of perspective and dramatic figuration at the origins
of modern Western art, with Raphael, Durer, Bellini and the other
familiar maestri. It is known as a product of divine gift, high skill,
deep emotion, and crafty planning. It plays with the notion of the
spontaneous, the unanticipated. The master picture-maker prepares
everything in advance, yet trusts that all the planning in the world will
lead only to something fresh, mobile, light and fascinating. 84
Wall has called his transparencies “tableaux morts,” playing on the term “tableaux
vivant,” and thus linking them to scenes staged by living persons in earlier
centuries. 85 Generally, however, he refers to his works as “pictures” and to his praxis
as “making pictures.” 86
The dialogue between photography and painting centered on the concept of
the tableau is quite complex. For Chevrier, and, as will be seen, for Wall, the
connections between the large photographic tableaux of the last 25 years and the
84
Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in
Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, exh. cat. (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 248.
85
Jeff Wall, “Typology, Luminescence, Freedom: Selections from a Conversation with Jeff Wall,” in
Els Barents, Jeff Wall: Transparencies, (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 95.
86
For example, Ibid., 95, 101, 102.
45
paintings of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century are natural, or at least
unproblematic, because neither acknowledges a break in the history of modernism. In
stark contrast to Douglas Crimp, for example, they do not view the Conceptual Art of
the late 1960s and 1970s to have marked a postmodernist rupture. As Chevrier says,
the continuous round trip from the present to the past is essential to understanding
current art. Thus, Wall’s photographic “remakes” of, and overt references to,
particular nineteenth-century paintings may borrow freely the formal qualities of the
historic form of the tableau.
Speaking of the process by which he arrived at the medium of the backlighted
transparency, Wall has said, “I came back to photography with the pictorial and the
picture.” 87 For Wall, the “autonomous image of the pictorial tradition…the pictorial
is, par excellence, non-conceptual and non-cognitive….The experience you may have
of a picture has no purpose, and cannot be used in any capacity. It forms us, it alters
our feelings, and it transforms us: this is why, according to Kant, we need art.” 88
For Wall, the term “picture” is key, as it underlies photography’s essential
depictive nature by identifying the technology with what it produces: “Photography
cannot find alternatives to depiction. . . .It is in the physical nature of the medium to
depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for
modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of
87
Jeff Wall, “Conversation between Jeff Wall and Jean-François Chevrier,” in Jeff Wall: Tableaux, ed.
Marit Woltmann, exh. cat. (Oslo: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 113. Wall
continues: “I had a feeling that certain possibilities of photography, as a medium, could be
implemented, possibilities that had remained invisible because of the institutional definition of the
medium. Painting carried within it traces of these photographic possibilities, which I took pleasure in
recognizing, right there in painting, as it happened….Why couldn’t photographs be larger and
physically involve the onlooker? Why couldn’t they be in colour?....It is in fact not exclusively up to
painting to be able to produce an image on the human scale.”
88
Ibid., 115.
46
being a depiction-which-constitutes-an-object.” 89 Emphasizing the technology, Wall
states, “photography constitutes a depiction not by the accumulation of individual
marks, but by the instantaneous operation of an integrated mechanism….Depiction is
the only possible result of the camera system, and the kind of image formed by a lens
is the only image possible in photography.” 90
This assertion would suggest that the kinds of pictures that Wall began to
make in 1978 demonstrate the essence of photography. He had participated in taking
photography through its “deconstructive,” self-critical phase during the conceptual
period, utilizing strategies such as the parodying of reportage and the repudiation of
skill—making pictures that were as apictorial and anaesthetic as possible. 91
According to Wall, this “self-critique” seemed to be required in order for
photography to reach the point of being considered “Art” on its own terms, even
though artists participating in this project had hoped to subvert that possibility.
Photography’s period of self-criticism, in Wall’s terms, suggests an evolutionary
process. But unlike Clement Greenberg’s model of modernist painting’s renunciation
of representation and illusion in its march toward “ineluctable flatness,” 92
photography, as distinct from painting, could not renounce depiction because that is
its essential characteristic.
89
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 247-48.
Ibid., 260. Writing in 1995, Wall was acutely aware of digital photographic technology, as he had
been producing digitally-manipulated pictures since the early part of the decade. Those works are
unquestionably depictive, even though they are comprised of multiple images and may have been
altered in other ways.
91
Wall’s snapshots and accompanying text were included in an exhibition of Conceptual Art in 1970.
See Information, ed. Kynaston McShine, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 130-33.
These pages were excerpted from Wall’s 56-page work titled Landscape Manual, 1969-70.
92
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brien (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 1993), 85-93, 87.
90
47
Wall’s Theoretical Approach
Jeff Wall produced conceptual art during the late 1960s that took the form of a
book comprised of blurred snapshots taken out of the window or windshield of a
moving car, accompanied by hand-corrected typed text. Landscape Manual would
become, in Wall’s terms, a model or parody of “the genre of the ‘book of
photographs,’ that classical form in which art-photography declares its
independence.” 93 Although Wall does not discuss his own conceptual work in
“Marks of Indifference,” the essay in which he explicates his theory of the evolution
of photography into an “institutionalized modernist form” that emerged by the mid1970s, Landscape Manual clearly would meet the criteria that Wall applied to Ed
Ruscha’s several books of amateurish snapshots produced between 1963 and 1970,
including Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Los Angeles Apartments (1965).
According to Wall, the photographs in Ruscha’s books reflect “the low-contrast
monochromaticism of the most utilitarian and perfunctory photographs;” they are, “as
reductivist works, models of our actual relations with their subjects, rather than
dramatized representations that transfigure those relations by making it impossible for
us to have such relations with them.” 94
Ruscha’s (and Wall’s) photoconceptual works, the amateurish photographs of
subjects that the average non-professional with a camera might have taken, are prime
examples of one of the fundamental strategies that artists used to create conceptual
art. According to Wall,
Photoconceptualism was then the last moment of the prehistory of
photography as art, the end of the Old Regime, the most sustained and
93
94
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 265.
Ibid.
48
sophisticated attempt to free the medium from its peculiar distanced
relationship with artistic radicalism and from its ties to the Western
Picture. In its failure to do so, it revolutionized our concept of the
Picture and created the conditions for the restoration of that concept as
a central category of contemporary art by around 1974. 95
In 1977, Wall produced his first large-scale fluorescent backlighted Cibachrome
transparency. 96
Wall’s essay is a narrative of the process of photography’s “auto-critique” in
which, during the 1960s and 1970s, it cast off the yoke of mid-century “artphotography,” and, drawing on some of the procedures and discourses of the 1920s
and 1930s, attempted to follow the example of modernist painting to divest itself of
its inessential qualities. Two of the auto-critical processes described by Wall are the
“rethinking and refunctioning of reportage” and the “de-skilling and re-skilling of the
artist.” 97 Each procedure placed into question the aestheticism of traditional artphotography, and recalled the radical, avant-garde attempts of the earlier period to
defeat it. Thus, in the 1960s, the aesthetic again became taboo. Yet, in an ironic
twist, by problematizing aestheticism, conceptual photographic practices
reestablished and maintained aestheticism as a permanent issue with which artists had
to grapple.
95
Ibid., 266.
The first work was a triptych titled Faking Death in which Wall posed as if dead in the center panel,
and in the other two panels appeared in the process of being made up for the central image. Each panel
was 101.3 x 127.0 cm. The work was shown with three others from April 11 to June 3, 1979. See Jeff
Wall: Installation of Faking Death [1977] The Destroyed Room [1978] Young Workers [1978] Picture
for Women [1979] (Victoria, B.C.: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1979). Faking Death is no longer
included in Wall’s oeuvre, and Wall has declined to permit it to be reproduced since 1979. Penny
Cousineau-Levine, Faking Death: Canadian art photography and the Canadian imagination
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 168.
97
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 248. The term “deskilling” has been defined as follows:
“‘De’skilling is taken to be a process in which artists separated their antiaesthetic use of photography
from the ‘fine art’ ambitions for the medium—the impetus for the de-skilling in the 1960s being the
work of fashion photographers, such as Richard Avedon or Irving Penn.” Mark Godfrey,
“Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh,” October 114 (Fall 2005), 97.
96
49
Wall chose Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson and Douglas
Heubler as examples of artists who found ways to imitate or parody reportage, by
creating work the content of which was “the validity of the model or hypothesis of
non-autonomy it creates.” 98 The gestures of Smithson and Long and the studio
performances of Nauman were staged for the purpose of the photograph, thus
inverting the notion of reportage. In his photo-essay Homes for America, 99 Dan
Graham produced a model of reportage, designed, according to Wall, to interrogate
the legitimacy of the original (Walker Evans’s work, for example) and thereby
legitimate itself as art. The work hovers on the threshold of an autonomous work. 100
Ruscha’s de-skilling of photography referenced above was a reductivist
procedure designed to test photography for its indispensable elements, and an
experiment with the anaesthetic, or “the look of non-art.” It had a utopian element,
which was the idea that art-making required no special skill, so the artist imitated the
novice with a camera: “It became a subversive creative act for a talented and skilled
artist to imitate a person of limited abilities. It was a new experience, one which ran
counter to all accepted ideas and standards of art, and was one of the last gestures
which could produce avant-gardist shock.” 101
Wall’s theory of photography’s auto-critique through photoconceptualism is
modeled upon Greenberg’s description of the reductivist trajectory of modernist
painting begun in about 1910. According to Wall,
The historical process of critical reflexivity derives its structure and
identity from the movements possible in, and characteristic of, the
98
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 252.
Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts Magazine 41 (December 1966-January 1967): 21-22.
100
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 257.
101
Ibid., 265.
99
50
older fine arts, like painting. The drama of modernization, in which
artists cast off the antiquated characteristics of their métiers, is a
compelling one, and has become the conceptual model of modernism
as a whole. 102
Wall then quotes Greenberg: “Certain factors we used to think essential to the making
and experiencing of art are shown not to be so by the fact that Modernist painting has
been able to dispense with them and yet continue to offer the experience of art in all
its essentials.” 103 Wall, again: “Yet photography’s own historical evolution into
modernist discourse has been determined by the fact that, unlike the older arts, it
cannot dispense with depiction and so, apparently, cannot participate in the adventure
it might be said to have suggested in the first place.” 104 In the end, the medium of
photography was its limiting and defining factor.
Thus, photography’s “drama of modernization” had a different ending from
that of painting. It could not dispense with depiction. Having barely survived its
prehistory, depiction could return in all its sensuous glory, offering an experience of
experience. The lessons had been learned, and the “Western Picture” was restored
“as a central category of contemporary art.” 105
It can be seen that Wall’s theoretical approach is very similar to that of
Chevrier, in that he abjures a postmodern break and thinks of photography in terms of
its “essential” quality. In that respect he follows Greenberg’s evolutionary model for
modernist painting. In Wall’s lack of interest in the notion of Postmodernism in the
sense elucidated by Douglas Crimp, he sees the conceptual period as a phase in the
development of photography to the point it had reached by the late 1970s, when Wall
102
Ibid., 258, 260.
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 92.
104
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 260.
105
Ibid., 266.
103
51
took it up again. Wall accurately describes photographically-based conceptual art
without ascribing to it any political or social purpose. Yet, he describes his own
mature oeuvre as having emanated from this critical period in which he had
participated until 1970. As discussed in Chapter Three, Wall’s work of the 1980s and
his writings of that earlier period do not eschew all complex earlier theories or the
social criticality and utility of art, and, in fact, embrace some of them.
Gerhard Richter’s Pictures
More than half a generation older than Jeff Wall and having grown up and
trained in what became East Germany following World War II, Gerhard Richter was
and is a painter. When he moved to West Germany in 1960, first to West Berlin and
then to Düsseldorf, he continued to paint, but began using photographs as the basis
for his painting praxis. Richter has discussed the need to find subjects in the life he
was beginning in the West, so used pictures he found in magazines, newspapers and
in snapshots of family and friends.
Richter, as does Wall, speaks in terms of the picture and making pictures,
whether in a photograph or a painting. As elaborated in Chapter Two, for Richter,
photography and painting are different ways of making pictures:
Of course, a long time ago, I thought a picture was a picture only if it
was painted. Later on I found to my great surprise that I could see a
photograph as a picture—and in my enthusiasm I often saw it as the
better picture of the two. It functions in the same way: it shows the
appearance of something that is not itself. 106
106
Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schutz, 1990,” in Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of
Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993 [hereinafter referred to as “DPP”], ed. Hans-Ulrich
Obrist, trans. David Britt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, in association with Anthony d’Offay Gallery,
London, 1995), 217.
52
During the course of his painting praxis since 1962 (the artist destroyed nearly
all of his work made in the German Democratic Republic), Richter has painted
subjects in every genre, beginning with Table (1962) [fig. I-2], which is based on a
photograph he found in an Italian design magazine. His subjects have included
portraits, such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966) [fig. I-3], a portrait of his wife
and the first work painted from a photograph that he took; landscapes, such as Bridge
(by the Sea) (1969) [fig. I-4]; still lifes, such as Two Candles (1982) [fig. I-5]; and
abstract works, such as Marian (1983) [fig. I-6]. Richter has also based paintings on
historic paintings which he has photographed and projected onto canvas. An example
is Annunciation After Titian (1973) [fig. I-7]. An examination of Richter’s painting
praxis with specific regard to his integration of painting and photography is included
in Chapter Two.
What Is a Picture?
The purpose of this chapter has been to establish the context for the
photographic art that developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which emphasized
a pictorial rather than a deconstructed approach. The art of Jeff Wall is particularly
important to this shift from conceptual, deskilled photographs toward large-scale,
pictorial, color photography, because he began to produce his signature work in 1978,
and because he has been so conversant with the terms of art history and issues of
medium in his essays and interviews. Gerhard Richter is also a touchstone of this
period because of his reliance on photographs in his painting praxis and his concern
with picturing irrespective of the purity of medium.
53
The term “picture,” as is evident from the foregoing discussion, is used
extensively in the context of photographic art. Douglas Crimp and Jean-François
Chevrier have approached the picture from very different perspectives. Crimp
appreciated the elasticity of the term, given its lack of specificity to a particular
medium and its function as a verb as well as a noun by referring to a mental process
as well as to the creation of an aesthetic object. Crimp focused on what he called
“structures of signification” in which pictorial images were appropriated and layered,
but because the artists he showed often were using pictures made by others, he did not
grapple with what a picture is. There is an assumption that the term is understood. It
is the contention of this study that Crimp’s series of essays was a concerted effort to
stave off the more traditional use of pictorial images in photography that he saw on
the horizon in 1977 and in museums by 1982.
Starting with the term “picture-form,” which he exchanged for “tableau,”
Jean-François Chevrier has been concerned, approvingly, with the large scale and
visual authority of the late twentieth-century photograph. The singular image
produced from an “actual reality” provides an experience, one of its key criteria, with
the assumption that large-scale photographs can produce an effect that is akin to life
experience. Chevrier is interested in the singularity of the object, its scale and its
impact, with the implicit assumption that the work is intelligible to the viewer.
Beginning his critical essays in 1989, with the advantage of hindsight, Chevrier’s
writings disdain Crimp’s postmodernist criteria and attempt to account for what had
occurred, particularly in Düsseldorf, Paris and Vancouver.
54
Jeff Wall repeatedly uses the terms “picture” and “depiction” in describing his
praxis, and, as does Chevrier, links pictures to experience:
But, dragging its heavy burden of depiction, photography could not
follow pure, or linguistic, Conceptualism all the way to the frontier. It
cannot provide the experience of the negation of experience, but must
continue to provide the experience of depiction, of the Picture. It is
possible that the fundamental shock that photography caused was to
have provided a depiction which could be experienced more the way
the visible world is experienced than had ever been possible
previously. A photograph therefore shows its subject by means of
showing what experience is like; in that sense it provides “an
experience of experience,” and it defines this as the significance of
depiction. 107 (Emphasis added.)
In Wall’s apparent agreement with Chevrier that pictures emanate from the
real world, there is a distinction, however. Most of Wall’s work, particularly during
the 1980s, depicts staged or “set-up” scenes that he invented or had observed and
caused to be constructed, and for which he hired performers to play parts. Thus, as
real as they may seem, they do not fit Chevrier’s criterion that they be recorded from
an “actual reality,” unless that reality is a fiction. Moreover, the art-historical
concepts and socially-oriented issues embedded in Wall’s work belie the simple
notion of the tableau. Richter’s work, also, complicates the notion of picture because
of the complex amalgamation of painting and photography, the myriad sources for his
paintings, and his history in twentieth-century Germany.
With this background in mind, Chapter Two explores the concept of medium
at the critical moment when photography assumed some of the characteristics and
roles of painting, and painting returned to prominence in a large-scale, figurative
mode.
107
Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 266.
55
CHAPTER TWO
WHAT’S A PURE MEDIUM?
“What’s a pure medium?” Robert Rauschenberg asked this question during a
symposium held in connection with the 1961 exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at
the Museum of Modern Art. 108 Given the mixture of mediums 109 in the art then
under discussion, the question was critical. It was asked of Lawrence Alloway, who
was attempting to distinguish art made with one substance, such as oil, pursuant to an
established set of procedures, from art that is a “cluster of heterogeneous things.”
Rauschenberg had inferred that Alloway posited a hierarchy of mediums, with a
“pure” medium at the top, and asserted that a combine is like a Rothko in every way:
“I use my material, and he uses his. And I don’t see that there’s any limitation to the
possibilities implied in the difference between my work and his.” 110
Rauschenberg had chosen the term “combine” for his assemblages because he
had tired of answering the question whether his art was painting or sculpture.
108
Joseph Ruzicka, ed., “The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium (1961),” in Essays on Assemblage,
Studies in Modern Art, no. 2 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 119-59. The panelists were
Lawrence Alloway, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Robert Rauschenberg and Roger
Shattuck. William C. Seitz, curator of the exhibition, moderated. The symposium was held on
October 19, 1961.
109
The term “mediums” is used in this study as the plural of “medium.” The alternative “media” has
been identified with electronic media, and the term “mediums” has been used repeatedly, if not
consistently, by art historians such as Douglas Crimp, Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, Richard
Schiff and Robert Storr. See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 57, n. 4: “Throughout this text I will use
mediums as the plural of medium in order to avoid a confusion with media, which I am reserving for
the technologies of communication indicated by that latter term.” Krauss had hinted at the possibility
of confusion in “‘And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” October 81 (Summer 1997):
5. See also Clement Greenberg, “Intermedia,” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C.
Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 93; and “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New
Art in the Sixties,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 4: 292. See, also, Richard Schiff, “Realism of
low resolution,” Apollo 144, no. 417 (November 1996): 4, 8; and Robert Storr, Preface to and
“Beginnings” in Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2003), 16, 41 and 42.
110
Ruzicka, 143.
56
Thinking this was an uninteresting and unimportant distinction, the artist deflected it
by choosing a word that could accommodate everything from painting to photographs
to objects from the outside world. 111 This indifference toward the notion of medium
recalls Marcel Duchamp’s readymades of the 1910s, and his mixture of mediums in a
work such as T’um (1918). Thus, Rauschenberg was asking a question that had been
asked before, but had been largely ignored during the intervening years.
In 1961, the importance of the question of medium was mounting. To take an
obvious example, Andy Warhol was using the commercially-developed silk-screen
process for works in which images taken directly from newspaper and magazine
photographs were applied to painted canvas. Rauschenberg, too, was using the silk
screen to collage images from popular culture and news sources onto canvas, while he
continued to make combines. Particularly important to this study, by 1962, Gerhard
Richter began to make paintings based on photographs collected from magazines,
newspapers, friends and family albums that he projected onto canvas. 112
With respect to the artists who are the focus of this study, the issue of medium
relates specifically to painting and photography, which have led conjoined and
somewhat mutually-contentious lives since the announcement of the invention of the
daguerreotype in 1839. Both Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter speak of “picturing”
without regard to medium. Richter calls his works “photopaintings.” Many of Wall’s
photographic transparencies of the 1980s were contemporary recapitulations of
111
“Once I called them ‘combines,’ people were confronted with the work itself, not what it
wasn’t….The word really does have a use—it’s a free-standing picture.” Robert Rauschenberg, “A
Conversation with Robert Rauschenberg,” interview by Richard Kostelanetz, Partisan Review 35
(Winter 1968): 96.
112
Richter’s first photopainting, Table (1962), was based on a photograph of a table in an Italian
design magazine.
57
historic paintings, and his Restoration (1993) [fig. II-1] is a digitalized transparency
showing painting conservators working on an enormous nineteenth-century painted
panorama in Switzerland. Its subject and its title are emblematic of critical aspects of
Wall’s oeuvre.
Other artists working with photography since the late 1970s and 1980s who
allude to painting in their art include German photographer Thomas Struth, who has
raised the issue of connections between photography and painting by photographing
museum visitors viewing iconic Western paintings. 113 Struth’s Düsseldorf Art
Academy colleague Andreas Gursky photographed Jackson Pollock’s One: Number
31, 1950 (Autumn Rhythm) in a way that seems to claim the painting as his own. 114
Certain of Gursky’s large-scale digitalized photographs have been discussed in terms
of their engagement with Romantic landscape and contemporary painting, particularly
the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Gerhard Richter.115 Gursky has voiced his
113
Thomas Struth’s museum photographs include Louvre IV, Paris (1989) 137 x 172.5 cm.; Galleria
dell’Accademia 1, Venice (1992) 184.5 x 228.3 cm.; National Museum of Art, Tokyo (1999) 169.5 x
257 cm.; and Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait, Munich (2000) 116.5 x 147 cm. The last photograph
depicts Struth from behind looking at Albrecht Durer’s Self-Portrait (1500), asserting a connection
between the two artists over a period of exactly 500 years. Struth studied painting with Gerhard
Richter from 1973 to 1976, before switching to photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher, in each case
at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Charles Wylie, “A History of Now: The Art of Thomas Struth,” in
Thomas Struth 1977 2002 (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2002), 148-50. Although Struth’s mature
work began in 1977 with modest-sized black-and-white photographs, his larger-scale color
photographs emerged in 1986. Ibid., 152, 154. A more recent group of Struth’s museum photographs
was exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, in April 2007.
114
Andreas Gursky’s Untitled VI (1997) 186 x 239 cm., depicts Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31,
1950 (1950) as exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Gursky has also photographed paintings by
J.M.W. Turner in Tate Britain (Turner Collection [1995]), and has enlarged a detail of a painting by
John Constable (Untitled X [1999]). See Plates 45, 23 and 52, respectively, in Peter Galassi, Andreas
Gursky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001). The scale of Gursky’s photographs grew from 92
x 81 cm. in his earliest exhibited works of 1984, to 107 x 131 cm. in 1987, to 207 x 508 cm. in 2000.
Galassi, 184-85.
115
Galassi, “Gursky’s World,” in Andreas Gursky, 9-43. This catalogue includes Gursky’s work since
his emergence from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1984 until 2000. Galassi sees in Gursky’s
photographs of the 1990s a strong dialogue with painting, particularly that of Gerhard Richter,
beginning in 1993 with Untitled I (1993), which he compares to Richter’s Gray (1973), and Gursky’s
Paris, Montparnasse (1993), which he compares to Richter’s 1024 Colors (1973). Other
58
admiration for the art of Jeff Wall, and Peter Galassi has remarked that Wall’s
influence shows in several photographs of the late 1980s. 116
Other photographers whose work alludes to painting include Gregory
Crewdson and Yasumasa Morimura, both of whom, as does Wall, operate in the
directorial mode. They stage elaborate scenes and create sets in which actors or, in the
case of Morimura, the artist himself, are photographed. Crewdson’s work is narrative
and cinematic, and Morimura’s replicates works by painters such as Edouard Manet
and Vincent Van Gogh. 117
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the concept of medium around
1980, in the shift from photographically-based conceptual art to the photographic
“grand machines” and large figural paintings that were then emerging. The issue of
medium as an aspect of the means of producing works of art—as an integral part of
art praxis—was a significant part of the critical art discourse during the period of this
study, and, as such, must be examined in depth.
comparisons are made to the painting of Caspar David Friedrich and Barnett Newman, and to
minimalist aesthetics. Galassi admits, however, that Gursky has not discussed these connections:
“Whether and in what sense Gursky had Richter’s gray paintings in mind before or as he made
Untitled I is now fundamentally irrelevant. For even had he intended nothing more than a homage to
the work of a famous painter (which I doubt), the impulse led him through the terms of his own very
different art to make an original picture—original with respect to Gursky’s own prior work, to
photographic tradition generally, and to Richter’s painting.” Galassi, 33-34.
116
Galassi gives as an example Gursky’s Giordano Bruno (1989). In a response to a question about
influence posed in a 1992 interview with Thomas Seelig , Gursky said the following: “I am in such a
tough spot with Jeff Wall. I have made pictures that you would readily take for a Jeff Wall. But these
I won’t show. I know that I admire him, he is a great model for me. I am trying to get along with that
in the most honest way possible and to let the influence run its course.” Galassi, 43n45. Moreover, in
Gursky’s first solo exhibition, which took place in the Düsseldorf airport in 1987, several of his
photographs were presented as backlit transparencies in advertising vitrines, similar to the presentation
of Wall’s work. Galassi, 42n27.
117
For examples of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson, see Twilight: Photographs by Gregory
Crewdson (New York: Harry Abrams, 2002). For examples of the photographs of Yasumasa
Morimura, see Yasumasa Morimura, Daughter of Art History: Photographs (New York: Aperture,
2003).
59
The large photographs and paintings of this period are distinguished from
collage and assemblage, which include various objects and materials, by virtue of the
fact that they are materially either painting or photography. The intersection of
mediums in such works is therefore much more subtle. The answer to
Rauschenberg’s question may be that there is no such thing as a “pure medium.”
What is a Medium?
In 1961, the year in which Clement Greenberg’s essay “Modernist Painting”
was first published in an arts magazine, 118 the notion of medium in modern art had
seemed generally settled. In “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg concluded his thoughts
on the essential and unique nature of the medium of painting based on its physical
attributes: “the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the
pigment.” 119
In his earlier essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” 120 Greenberg had argued
the importance of the separation of the arts from each other-- music and literature, for
example—and, in the visual arts, the separation of painting from sculpture. There
Greenberg had first expressed his ideas about purity in art and the unfortunate
concealment of medium in historic painting that had emphasized illusion in the
service of subject matter. Avant-garde art’s revolt against the domination of literature
beginning in the mid-nineteenth century resulted in a greater emphasis on form, and,
118
Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” was broadcast and first published by Voice of America in 1960;
it was published in Arts Yearbook 4 in 1961. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 93.
119
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 86. “It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface
that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art
criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial
art….Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting
oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.” Ibid., 87.
120
Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 1: 23-38;
previously published in Partisan Review 7 (August 1940): 296-310.
60
beginning with Manet, saw the problems of painting as problems of the medium. In
this essay, Greenberg focused on the nature of the medium of painting:
The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender
to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the
flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to “hole through” it for realistic
perspectival space….But most important of all, the picture plane itself
grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together
the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and
material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas. 121
The suggestion of mixing mediums, or of an “impure” medium, was unthinkable to
Greenberg, as he blamed the “confusion” of the arts for the decline in painting until
Manet began to produce the first modernist pictures: “The arts, then, have been
hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and
defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To
restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized.” 122
It cannot be a coincidence that 1961 was the year in which Robert
Rauschenberg asked his seminal and prescient question and Greenberg published
“Modernist Painting.” It is worth considering to what extent the publication of
Greenberg’s definitive statement about the medium of painting was a response to
some of the art he had seen exhibited in New York since the mid-1950s, which would
have included art in which barriers between mediums seemed to be breaking down,
including Rauschenberg’s combines. 123 Greenberg did not review Rauschenberg’s
work or any Pop Art, but made disparaging comments in passing about both in
121
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 32.
123
Rauschenberg’s combines were first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. Robert
Rosenblum, “Robert Rauschenberg,” Arts, no. 6 (March 1958): 61.
122
61
several essays. 124 His reviews of photography asserted its status as a separate,
“literary” medium. 125
The discourse concerning the notion of medium accelerated during the 1960s.
The advent of Minimalism in the middle of the decade was memorialized by Donald
Judd in his essay “Specific Objects,” in which Judd declared that “half or more of the
best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.” 126 He
proceeded to describe the new three-dimensional work that eschewed “the problem of
illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which is
riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art….In the
new work the shape, image, color and surface are single and not partial and
scattered.” 127
124
In a 1962 essay in which he criticized artists who have “gone in for” “Neo-Dada” and
“construction-collage,” Greenberg spoke disparagingly of an artist who “harpoons stuffed whales to
plane surfaces,” putting such art into the category of novelty with no staying power. Clement
Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 4: 133-34. One
wonders whether the reference to the harpooning of a stuffed animal was a thinly-veiled criticism of
Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955-59), in which a stuffed angora goat was attached to a wooden
platform. A critique of Pop Art appeared in a 1969 essay, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the
Sixties,” 302.
125
With regard to his views on photography, see Clement Greenberg, “Four Photographers: Review of
A Vision of Paris by Eugene-Auguste Atget; A Life in Photography by Edward Steichen; The World
Through My Eyes by Andreas Feininger; and Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, introduced by Lincoln
Kerstein, in Collected Essays and Criticism, 4: 183-87; previously published in New York Review of
Books, January 23, 1964. See, also, Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an
Exhibition of Edward Weston,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 60-63;
previously published in Nation, March 9, 1946. In each of those reviews, Greenberg asserted that
photography was literary: “The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else….The
photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.” “Four Photographers,” 183. Speaking of
Weston’s photographs, Greenberg said, “In the last analysis this is a confusion of photography with
painting—but a confusion not so much of the effects of each as of the approaches proper to each. The
result, as is often the case with confusions of the arts, shows a tendency to be artiness rather than
art….The final moral is: let photography be literary.” “The Camera’s Glass Eye,” 63. Thus,
Greenberg accorded photography the status of art, but it was an art distinct from and not to be confused
with modernist painting.
126
Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 181; previously published in Arts Yearbook 8,
1965.
127
Judd, 186, 187.
62
The work that was neither painting nor sculpture but that merged aspects of
each and made unique demands on viewers prompted Michael Fried to criticize
minimalist art as “theatrical.” 128 To Fried, an art object that confronted the viewer in
his space, was in his way, and refused to let him alone, 129 lay between the arts. As
does theater, minimalist art exists for an audience, the “beholder,” and is incomplete
without him or her. Moreover, as with theater, the experience of minimalist art is
directed from outside and involves duration, unlike a painting that can be experienced
essentially instantaneously, because “at every moment the work itself is wholly
manifest.” 130 For Fried, a work that is neither painting nor sculpture occupies a
category he termed “objecthood,” which is a condition of “non-art.” 131 Although for
Donald Judd, a work of art had only to be interesting, for Fried, it had to be
“convincing.” Ultimately, Fried was concerned with quality and value, with making
a value judgment while experiencing an artwork. 132 This essay is important here for
its criticism of and concern about art that was not confined to a single medium. It is
also important for its acknowledgment that art was changing—albeit in ways that
Fried did not like—and the changes had to do with the way viewers were forced to
experience the newer art.
128
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172; previously published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12-23.
129
Ibid., 154, 163.
130
Ibid., 167. Emphasis supplied.
131
Ibid., 152.
132
To illustrate this point, Fried presented the example of the “enormous difference in quality”
between the paintings of [Morris] Louis and Robert Rauschenberg to show that “art degenerates as it
approaches the condition of theater.” The point was that Louis’s work was pure painting, while in
Rauschenberg’s, “the barriers between the arts [between painting and theater] are in the process of
crumbling.” Ibid., 164. In language similar to Greenberg’s, Fried went on to say that “the individual
arts have never been more explicitly concerned with the conventions that constitute their respective
essences.”
63
In a nearly contemporaneous essay titled “Other Criteria,” Leo Steinberg
addressed art that departed from traditional art made for the wall.133 Steinberg
focused particularly on Rauschenberg’s combines and other art of the period, which
had altered fundamentally the relation between a work of art and the viewer by
changing what he called the angulation with respect to erect human posture, and
therefore required “other criteria” by which it could be understood and judged. This
essay constituted an extensive argument against the narrowness of the view expressed
by Greenberg in “Modernist Painting,” which Steinberg regarded as having reduced
“the art of a hundred years to an elegant one-dimensional sweep.” 134 In his last
paragraph, Steinberg summed up the “contaminated” state of what he termed “postModernist painting:”
The all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-Modernist painting
has made the course of art once again non-linear and unpredictable.
What I have called the flatbed is more than a surface distinction if it is
understood as a change within painting that changed the relationship
between artist and image, image and viewer. Yet this internal change
is no more than a symptom of changes which go far beyond questions
of picture planes, or of painting as such. It is part of a shakeup which
contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art
into non-art continue to alienate the connoisseur as art defects and
departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule
an eroding plain. 135 (Emphasis added.)
133
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 55-91. This essay was previously published in 1972, and
was based on a lecture given at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. It reflected a determined effort to
understand Robert Rauschenberg’s combines as proposing a horizontal display of information (the
“flatbed picture plane”), marking it as art that needed to be assessed by criteria other than those
established by Greenberg. In a sense, Fried’s and Steinberg’s essays, although not specifically
addressing all of the same art or artists, were nearly contemporaneous efforts to come to terms (or not)
with art that did not follow the traditional separation of mediums and that invoked a new relationship
with the viewer. It is notable that both were concerned with Rauschenberg.
134
Ibid., 66.
135
Ibid., 91.
64
Fried’s and Steinberg’s essays demonstrate the serious attention accorded the
concept of medium in the critical discourse of the late 1960s. Those discussions were
taking place as artists increasingly ignored Greenberg’s admonition against confusion
of the arts and his concern with the specificity of the material support. Greenberg
himself criticized much art of the 1960s in a 1969 essay in which he disparaged
everything from Pop Art to land and performance art as novelties lacking in
quality. 136 In that essay, Greenberg recognized the multiplicity of new forms of art,
and referred repeatedly to the “confusion” that appeared to have resulted:
The prevalent notion is that latter-day art is in a state of confusion….
Innovations follow closer and closer on one another and, because they
don’t make their exits as rapidly as their entrances, they pile up in a
welter of eccentric styles, trends, tendencies, schools. Everything
conspires, it would seem, in the interests of confusion. The different
mediums are exploding: painting turns into sculpture, sculpture into
architecture, engineering, theatre, environment, “participation.” Not
only the boundaries between the different arts, but the boundaries
between art and everything that is not art, are being obliterated….And
to add to the confusion, high art is on the way to becoming popular art,
and vice versa. 137
Greenberg’s “confusion,” Fried’s “theatricality” and Steinberg’s
“contamination” were reflections of the major changes that art historians were
struggling to come to terms with, and that Rauschenberg had dismissed as irrelevant.
They related to the material of which art was made and to the relationship between an
artwork and the viewer.
The Postmodern Medium
Douglas Crimp, whose writings on postmodernist photographically-based art
are discussed in the previous chapter, found the mixture of mediums in the art that he
136
137
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties,” 300-03.
Ibid., 292.
65
observed during the late 1970s praiseworthy. His “strategies of signification” often
involved the layering of several mediums in one work, and part of their
deconstructive power was derived from radical new approaches to medium.
Crimp’s focus evolved into a critique of the institution of the museum through
a Foucauldian approach that viewed the museum as a “discursive system,” 138 and he
saw a mixture of mediums as advancing that critique. Crimp praised the 1960s silkscreen works of Robert Rauschenberg for their destruction of the integrity of painting
by “hybridizing it, corrupting it with photographic images.” 139 By bringing the world
into the museum through such hybridized works, photography revealed that the
autonomy of art was a fiction. Thus, until the early 1980s, photography performed a
salutary deconstructive task when used in conjunction with paint. Crimp lamented
the “reclassification” of photography to an art form in the early 1980s, which
involved the transfer of the “rhetoric of aesthetics” to photography and the investment
of the medium with the “trappings of subjectivity.” 140 The photography of the
Düsseldorf photographers as well as Jeff Wall, therefore, would have been for Crimp
a step backward in the abandonment of the kinds of adversarial art practices that he
valorized, and the consequent failure to challenge the museum.
In 1984, Crimp participated in a panel discussion that was one of several
symposia titled “Art for the 80’s” held at New York University. Roger Kimball’s
report on the discussion includes the following excerpts regarding Douglas Crimp’s
views:
138
Douglas Crimp, “Photographs at the End of Modernism,” in On the Museum’s Ruins, 13. See, also,
Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins.”
139
Crimp, “Photographs at the End of Modernism,” 14.
140
Ibid., 15.
66
He praised the work of Duchamp and German Dada…but the sterling
instance of his desideratum was the work of the Soviet avant-garde in
the 1920s. Here, in the productions of Agitprop, the Theater of the
Revolution, and the photography and propaganda pieces of Alexander
Rodchenko, he found the desired “mass productions for a mass
audience.”…. Thus the envisioned view of art, Mr. Crimp stressed,
“did not consist of an aesthetics with social implications; it consisted
of a politicized aesthetic, a socialist art.”
One of the things he would like to see accomplished, incidentally, is
the “destruction of easel painting” as an art form….Mr. Crimp—as he
surely knows—is attacking the very idea of the museum as a place for
the appreciation of art.
For him, one gathered, the only alternative to a politicized art is an
extreme aestheticism, a view of art as a completely autonomous
activity, unrelated to human hopes, dreams, and fears. 141
As evidenced by the foregoing, Crimp’s views on art, certainly by 1984, were
fundamentally political, and his praise for hybridized approaches was aimed at
dismantling the institution of the museum, particularly the Museum of Modern Art,
whose practices he believed had the effect of “de-radicaliz[ing] even the radical
works it exhibits.” 142
Another View of Medium: Rosalind Krauss
Writing contemporaneously with Douglas Crimp and continuing to the
present, Rosalind Krauss has engaged in a uniquely intensive and prolonged
exploration of the concept of medium. 143 Krauss’s writings of the last 30 years have
141
Roger Kimball, “‘Art’ for the Eighties?” The New Criterion 3, no. 4 (December 1984): 83-88.
Ibid., 86. Kimball was describing Crimp’s criticism of the placement of a poster by Rodchenko for
the Theater of the Revolution directly above a poster advertising martinis, thus “blurring ‘important
distinctions in use value’ and ‘transforming Agitprop into advertising.’”
143
Rosalind Krauss, “Impressionism: The Narcissism of Light,” Partisan Review 43, no. 1 (1976):
102-12; “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68-81; “Notes on
the Index: Seventies Art in America (Part 2),” October 4 (Fall 1977): 210-219; “Sculpture in the
Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30-44; “Photography’s Discursive Spaces:
Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311-319; “A Note on Photography and the
Simulacral,” in OverExposed, ed. Carol Squiers (New York: New Press, 1999), 169-82, first published
in October 31 (Winter 1984):49-68; “‘…And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,”
142
67
constituted a major part of the art-historical discourse on medium in general and the
function of photography in particular, and therefore they are worth considering at
length. As will be seen, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh, whose writings are
discussed below, have continued Crimp’s criticism of painting and other art forms
that they deem insufficiently critical.
From the outset, Krauss focused on photography’s role in and as art, often
spurred by specific exhibitions of contemporary art. She has not been as concerned
as Crimp with the need for dismantling the museum as an institution, nor has she
taken the overtly strident political positions espoused by Buchloh. As will be seen,
Rosalind Krauss is more focused upon the structuring of a medium within a work of
art based predominantly on certain early twentieth-century theoretical perspectives.
That said, Krauss and Buchloh developed their respective approaches to art in the
charged environment that emanated from the economic and political upheavals of
1968 in West Germany and the United States, and each pursues a critical posture that
is absolutist and grounded in the earlier writings of members of the Frankfurt School.
They receive considerable attention in this study because they have each maintained a
prolonged, high-relief posture within the discourse on art of the last several decades.
In a rather tentative and uncritical beginning, Krauss described the influence
of photography, particularly the calotype, on the painting and print-making of Claude
October 81 (Summer 1997): 5-33; “Reinventing ‘Photography, ’” in The Promise of Photography: The
DG Bank Collection, ed. Luminita Sabau (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 33-40; “Reinventing the Medium,”
Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 289-305; A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999); “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph,”
in James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1999), 8-25; “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,”
in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1999), 155-79; “’The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92
(Spring 2000): 3-35; and “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition,” October 116 (Spring
2006): 55-62.
68
Monet and Edgar Degas. 144 By 1997, Krauss had concluded that art had entered a
“post-conceptual” and “post-medium” age in which photography functioned not as a
medium but as a “theoretical object,” a tool for deconstructing artistic practice. 145
Krauss has explored in depth the art practices of James Coleman and William
Kentridge, demonstrating her view that they “reinvented” their respective mediums.
In contrast, she has castigated Jeff Wall’s pictorial photographic practice as a
“revanchiste restoration of the traditional media that was so characteristic of the art of
the 1980’s.” 146 A comparison of her views on those artists’ works will be instructive.
Krauss’s approach has been grounded in the ideas and theories of Marcel
Duchamp, Roland Barthes and, particularly, Walter Benjamin. She has applied
theories of linguistics and montage developed in the early twentieth century to the art
of the last two decades of that century, focusing on photography as a process, or a set
of logical operations, that has functioned to diminish art’s aesthetic aspects, narrative
content and totalizing effects. Accordingly, Krauss has employed words and phrases
throughout her writing to describe positive elements of certain kinds of artwork:
montage, splinter, shatter, shock, fissure, rupture, gap, interruption, collision, divide,
disjunction, contradiction, opposition, subversion of suture, dispersal of unity, and
suppression of narrative. In this study, the term “rupture” will stand for the notions
144
Krauss, “Impressionism: The Narcissism of Light.” This essay ends with a discussion of minimal
and video art.
145
Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 294-96. This essay was published in a volume dedicated to
articles on Walter Benjamin, and exemplifies the degree to which Krauss bases her theories on his
writings.
146
Ibid., 297.
69
expressed by those terms. Except as a foil for valorizing the work of an artist such as
Coleman, Krauss has no interest in artists who create pictures. 147
Krauss thinks that the notion of medium per se in postmodernity is not
obsolete, and is worthy of continued use. She has not argued for the irrelevance of
medium, or for the mixture of mediums seen “ubiquitously” in installation art since
the mid-1970s. 148 She argues for the “specificity” of a medium, which she has
defined as a “recursive structure—a structure, that is, some of the elements of which
will produce the rules that generate the structure itself.” 149 The notion of specificity
is elaborated in Krauss’s essays on the art of artists James Coleman and William
Kentridge, in which medium becomes an operational term, as opposed to a material
term.
The first paragraph of her introduction to Voyage on the North Sea, an essay
that Krauss termed “this meditation on the medium,” confirms her retention of the
concept of medium: “At first I thought I could simply draw a line under the word
medium, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, and walk away from it in a world of
lexical freedom. ‘Medium’ seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too
dogmatically, too discursively loaded.” 150 In retaining the concept of medium,
Krauss has defined quite a narrow path for artists working in postmodernity to follow.
147
Aside from a brief review of the retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerhard Richter at the
Museum of Modern Art in 2002, Krauss has not written about his painting.
148
Krauss’s reference to ubiquity is clearly pejorative: “Whether it calls itself installation art or
institutional critique, the international spread of the mixed-media installation has become ubiquitous.”
Further, “…There are a few contemporary artists who have decided …not to engage in the
international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit
with a globalization of the image in the service of capital. These same artists have also resisted, as
impossible, the retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums—such as painting and
sculpture.” Voyage on the North Sea, 20, 56.
149
Ibid., 6-7.
150
Ibid. 5. Krauss credited Stanley Cavell’s notion of “automatism” in his exploration of film for
leading her to the concepts of improvisation, internal plurality, recursive structure and selfspecification.
70
They may not mix mediums, or retreat to traditional mediums, but must mine,
excavate, deconstruct or reconfigure a single extant medium that is on the verge of
obsolescence or collapse.
It is worth tracing the development of Krauss’s arguments in order to
determine how they reflect on the period and art at issue in this study. She began to
theorize about medium around the time that Douglas Crimp began to describe new
photographic procedures, beginning with his exhibition “Pictures” in 1977. Rather
than follow Crimp’s directly oppositional stance toward the museum as an institution,
however, Krauss has examined the nature of photography and what she has seen as
the progressively critical operations it has performed within contemporary art.
In “Notes on the Index,” a two-part essay published in 1977, Krauss noted the
pervasiveness of photography during that decade as a method of representation by
documenting art forms such as land art, body art and video. Writing before the advent
of digital photography, and speaking specifically of documentary photographs,
Krauss described photography as “indexical.” In a linguistic analysis that pervades
both parts of the essay, she defined indexes as “signs that establish their meaning
along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents,” such as footprint, so that
the original object is fixed in a trace. 151 The signal advantage of the indexical nature
of photography was that it prevented an artist’s formal intervention and creation of a
style: it “seems to short-circuit or disallow the processes of schematization or
symbolic intervention that operate within the graphic representations of most
paintings.” 152 This canceling-out of artistic creativity—“the Symbolic finding its way
151
152
Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” 70.
Ibid., 75.
71
into pictorial art through the human consciousness operating behind the forms of
representation”-- also avoids “the language of aesthetic conventions and the kind of
history they encode.” Krauss relied heavily on Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the
readymade, asserting that the readymade is “parallel” with the photograph by virtue
of their similar processes of production: “It is about the physical transposition of an
object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a
moment of isolation, or selection.” 153 The readymade is like a snapshot, in that both
preclude the kind of artistic activity involved in making a painting.
In Part 2 of “Notes on the Index,” Krauss focused on an exhibition called
“Rooms” for the May 1976 opening of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. 154 Here, the
index was defined as “any type of sign which arises as a physical manifestation of a
cause.” She cited Benjamin and Barthes for their assertions of the need to encode
photographs with text or captions, but allowed that in the case of the P.S.1 artists, the
placement of their art within particular spaces of the building and the sequencing of
certain works provided “articulate[ion] into a kind of cinematic narrative.” 155 In
those ways, the exhibited photographs could avoid the internal logic that Krauss
found in painting of the 1960s, even in the abstract work of an artist such as Ellsworth
Kelly. For Krauss, the use of pictorial means to establish meaning was to be avoided.
By 1979, Krauss had determined that medium no longer functioned in any
traditional sense. Observing the earth/land art of artists such as Robert Smithson,
Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer initiated between 1968 and 1970, Krauss saw a
153
Ibid., 78.
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center was established in 1976 in a former public school building in Long
Island City, Queens, New York for the purpose of exhibiting the art of emerging artists. It is now
affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art.
155
Krauss, “Notes on the Index (Part 2),” 219.
154
72
“historical rupture and structural transformation of the cultural field” which she
termed postmodernism. 156 The site constructions and marked sites created by those
artists were neither landscape nor architecture, but could be defined as both, thus
ending the negativity of categorical exclusion so crucial to modernist art. 157 “For,
within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given
medium—sculpture--but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural
terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or
sculpture itself--might be used.” 158 In the artworks that Krauss considered in this
essay, photography was a form of marking integral to a complex of artistic processes.
She still characterized photography as a “medium,” but a one that could no longer
function as it had in modernist art:
From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that the logic of the
space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the
definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that
matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the
156
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 41: “It seems fairly clear that this permission (or
pressure) to think the expanded field was felt by a number of artists at about the same time, roughly
between the years 1968 and 1970. For, one after another Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael
Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman…had entered a
situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist. In order to name
this historical rupture and the structural transformation of the cultural field that characterizes it, one
must have recourse to another term. The one already in use in other areas of criticism is
postmodernism. There seems no reason not to use it.”
157
Krauss utilized a paradigm borrowed from mathematics, semiotics and structuralism to demonstrate
the logical possibilities of expanding a field from a binary one to a quaternary one. The Klein group
provided a means of diagramming her concept of the expansion of the field of sculpture to architecture
and landscape. Ibid., 36-38. Krauss cited as a source Marc Barbut, “On the Meaning of the Word
‘Structure’ in Mathematics,” in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic
Books, 1970), 367-88. The Klein group is a prototype of an algebraic structure from which a table can
be constructed to describe relationships among elements of the structure. It is purely descriptive, and
involves no causal connections or proofs. I would argue that Krauss’s odd enlistment of this
mathematical paradigm implies an unwarranted underlying validity to her theory of “this historical
rupture.” In an attempt to map photography’s “expanded field” within postmodernism—to trace “the
life and potential transformation of a former medium’s expanded field”--George Baker took his terms
from Krauss. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 120-40. He
asserted, correctly I think, that Krauss’s use of the Klein group was a structuralist approach in which
she did not abandon the concept of medium.
158
Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 42.
73
universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural
situation…. It follows, then, that within any one of the positions
generated by the given logical space, many different mediums might
be employed. 159 (Emphasis added.)
Krauss’s essays of the 1970s are exploratory, in much the way that Douglas
Crimp’s were. 160 Having first focused on the indexical nature of photography and its
consequent usefulness in countering the notions of aesthetics and artistic authorship
and oeuvre, Krauss expanded the use value of photography in her description of its
marking function within site constructions that she viewed as having opened up the
field of sculpture and marked the rupture that was Postmodernism. At that point,
medium as material was no longer significant, as artistic practice had become a set of
cultural operations within a given field.
In “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” Krauss enlarged her view of
photography into a project for the deconstruction of all art. Its “technical existence as
a multiple” had collapsed the difference between the original and the copy, not just
for photography but for painting and sculpture as well:
159
Ibid., 43. The reference to medium as “material” implicitly invokes Greenberg’s emphasis on the
material support of painting in “Modernist Painting” and other essays.
160
Krauss’s approaches to photography and medium are different from Crimp’s, in that her work
tended to be more analytic of particular forms of art and less concerned with criticism of the museum.
But in “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” she criticized two museum photography exhibitions for
their assimilation of the history of photography into the aesthetic discourse of the history of art.
Krauss argued for a separate discourse for certain nineteenth-century landscape photography that
would connect it to geology and science, the arenas in which it was produced. This essay was a
pointed response to Peter Galassi’s exhibition “Before Photography,” and John Szarkowski’s four-part
exhibition, “Atget and the Art of Photography,” both held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1981.
Krauss’s concern was what she considered the dismantling of the photographic archive in order to
reassemble it within categories established by art history, which is essentially the history of painting
and one that is unrelated to the conditions under which the photographic archives in question were
formed. The argument is grounded in Foucault’s admonition in The Archaeology of Knowledge to
submit an archive to analysis to determine the conditions of its discursive formation, rather than fitting
it within externally determined categories. “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 317. Her arguments
here also serve to maintain a separate space for photography, which she saw as performing a useful
project of deconstruction in late twentieth century.
74
For contemporary painting and sculpture has experienced
photography’s travesty of the ideas of originality, or subjective
expressiveness, or formal singularity, not as a failed version of these
values, but as a denial of the very system of difference by which these
values can be thought at all. By exposing the multiplicity, the
facticity, the repetition, and stereotype at the heart of every aesthetic
gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating
between the original and the copy, the first idea and its slavish
imitation. 161
Photography’s “travesty,” in Krauss’s ironic term, was to question the possibility of
the uniqueness of any art object. Although this concept is clearly derived from
Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay, Krauss did not cite Benjamin here. She
concluded that the discourse of photography was not aesthetic, and lamented the
difficulties of “the growing number of writers on photography as they try to find a
language with which to analyze photography in isolation, whether on the wall of a
museum, a gallery, or a lecture hall.” 162 By 1984, the year in which this essay was
published, however, large-scale, aesthetic photography had invaded the museum and
the gallery as an art practice and “medium” unto itself, and the discourse was
becoming clearly focused on aesthetics.
In a series of three essays published in 1997, 1998 and 1999, respectively, 163
Krauss delved more deeply into what she meant by the term “medium” and began to
define what she considered praiseworthy artistic practices in the postmodern/postmedium era. 164 The arguments developed in these essays embed some ideas that
161
Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,”176.
Ibid., 182. This essay began with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of photography
from a sociological perspective. Clearly, Krauss did not regard this approach as productive,
irrespective of the fact that it does not focus on photography as art or an art medium.
163
“‘…And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman;” “Reinventing ‘Photography;’” and
“Reinventing the Medium.”
164
The three essays are integrally related in that “Reinventing the Medium” recapitulates “Reinventing
Photography,” with the addition of a “telescoped version” of Krauss’s argument in “‘…And Then Turn
Away?’: an Essay on James Coleman.” Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 289n.
162
75
Benjamin expressed in the Artwork Essay and “Little History of Photography,” 165
and rely as well upon Roland Barthes’s analysis of Sergei Eisenstein’s films
expressed in “The Third Meaning.” 166 Thus, they connect art of the late twentieth
century directly to those theorists of the early and mid-twentieth century.
From a historical perspective, Krauss asserted that art and photography
converged in the 1960s, as they had in the 1920s and 1930s. Recapitulating the role it
had played in the 1930s, photography became a “theoretical object” again in the
1960s and lost its specificity as a medium: in its status as a copy—a multiple without
an original—“it splintered the supposed unity of the original ‘itself’ into a series of
quotations.” 167 The artist, or author, became a reader, a “pasticheur,” without the
possibility of creating something original. Krauss relied on Benjamin’s Artwork
Essay to say that the reproducibility of photography denied the value of the aesthetic,
and ended the idea of any independent medium: “the ‘Work of Art’ essay will now
see the photographic—which is to say mechanical reproduction in all its modern,
technological guises—as both source and symptom of a full-scale demise of this aura
across all of culture, so that art itself, as celebrator of the unique and the authentic,
will empty out completely.” 168 As Conceptual Art developed during the 1960s,
according to Krauss, the specificity of medium was abandoned in favor of “art in
general.” With photography’s inherently hybrid structure because of its need for a
165
Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2,
1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and
Others, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 507-30.
166
Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills,” in Image Music
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 52-68.
167
Krauss, “Reinventing ‘Photography,’” 33.
168
Ibid., 34.
76
caption, or, in Benjamin’s term, an “inscription,” it could perform the role of art in
general.
It is worth noting that Krauss has cited Jeff Wall’s essay “Marks of
Indifference” for its account of the history and origins of Conceptual Art. Yet,
ironically, by the 1980s, just as an artist such as Wall had come into his own with the
production of large-scale color transparencies—when photography had entered into
“aesthetic production,” according to Krauss--photography became an industrial
discard:
Photography has, then, suddenly become one of those industrial
discards, a newly established curio, like the jukebox or the trolley-car.
But it is at just this point and in this very condition as outmoded, that it
seems to have entered into a new relation to aesthetic production. This
time, however, photography functions against the grain of its earlier
destruction of the medium, becoming, under precisely the guise of its
own obsolescence, a means of what has to be called an act of
“reinventing the medium.” 169
Thus, at the moment of its obsolescence photography acquired the capacity
to play a redemptive role in the reinvention of a “medium as such.” For Krauss, the
notion of a medium as such is “a medium as a set of conventions derived from (but
not identical to) the material conditions of a given technical support, conditions out of
which to develop a form of expressiveness that can be both projective and
mnemonic.” 170 It is not to be understood as a restoration of any traditional medium,
including photography itself.
The notion of the redemptive possibilities of an obsolescent technology
derives directly from Benjamin’s theorization of the outmoded. This possibility
169
170
Ibid., 36.
Ibid.
77
arose, in his view, when a technology passed from mass-use into obsolescence, which
was a time when its promise near the time of its invention could be revealed:
In 1935 Benjamin had articulated his idea of the onset of obsolescence
as a possible, if momentary, revelation of the utopian dreams encoded
within the various forms of technology at the points of their
inception. 171
James Coleman’s “reinvention” of the projected slide tape, a low-tech
commercial support, is the example that Krauss first chose to elucidate her notion of a
medium as such. The continuous automatic projection of two tapes of slides onto
large screens that face each other in a “double face-out,” was, for Krauss, an
investment of expressiveness into the materiality of an outmoded support. The
“paradoxical collision” between stillness and movement at the interstices of the
changes of slides is borrowed from Roland Barthes’s concept of the “third meaning”
in his eponymous essay in which a photographic still—a fragment of a second text—
must be read vertically within the horizontal movement of a film. 172 Coleman’s
171
Krauss cites Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography;” “Letter from Paris (2): Painting and
Photography,” in Selected Writings 3: 236-48; and “The Theory of Criticism,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1996), 217-19. Benjamin quoted Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on
finding the new in the old: “The creative potential of the new is for the most part slowly revealed
through old forms, old instruments and areas of design which in their essence have already been
superseded by the new, but which under pressure from the new as it takes shape are driven to a
euphoric efflorescence.” Further, “the most precise technology can give its products a magical value,
such as a painted picture can never again have for us.” “Little History of Photography,” 523; 510. In
“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Benjamin spoke in a different way of the new being
embedded in the old: “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming,
precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed—by
cunning.” Selected Writings 3: 43-44.
172
Barthes, “The Third Meaning.” Written in 1970, Barthes was looking back to the 1920s at
Eisenstein’s methods of montage in film. Barthes defined an “obtuse” level of meaning that could be
produced in the viewer by an image that “exceeded” the referential motif, thus compelling an
interrogative reading of a film. The obtuse meaning could “open the field of meaning infinitely.” It is
discontinuous with and indifferent to the story and obvious meaning of the film. Thus, the third
meaning creates a “counter-narrative,” and “radically recasts the theoretical status of the anecdote.”
Barthes dwells heavily on descriptions of images that produce “third meanings” in particular films.
Krauss is much less interested in analyzing images or in creating other readings within a narrative; she
78
double face-out imposes a “counter-narrative” and a “permutational play,” as the two
screens showing persons involved in conversation, but who face “out” rather than
each other, subvert the narrative “suture” that traditional films produce, and constitute
“a reflexive acknowledgment of the impossibility of the visual field to deliver its
promise of either life-likeness or authenticity.” 173
Krauss also found within the commercial slide tape the presence of the even
more outmoded technology of the magic lantern, the nineteenth-century precursor of
the slide projector: there is
an imaginative capacity stored within this technical support and made
suddenly retrievable at the moment when the armoring of technology
breaks down under the force of its own obsolescence. To “reinvent”
the slide tape as a medium… is to release this cognitive capacity,
thereby discovering the redemptive possibilities within the
technological support itself. 174
This language is much more reliant on Benjamin than on Barthes. The goal is not to
produce another narrative from a counter-image, but to open up the work altogether.
It is worth asking why Krauss is so laudatory of work such as Coleman’s
reinvention, deconstruction or interrogation of a medium that is sliding into
obsolescence. 175 What is its value as art for the viewer or society? It would seem
seems focused solely on the process of disruption or rupture within a particular technical support.
Thus, I would argue that she has overdrawn her reading of Barthes as an analogy for her own ends.
173
Krauss, “Reinventing ‘Photography,’” 38. To experience a work by James Coleman, the viewer
stands in a darkened room where the apparatuses of two slide projectors make their familiar clicks and
whirs as the slides advance in sequence, producing the interstices between images of which Krauss
speaks. The different images projected onto two large screens that face each other at an angle provide
a confusing juxtaposition from which the viewer works to construct a narrative. The construction of a
narrative, however, is just what Coleman’s “invention” works to subvert. The viewer is therefore not
“sutured” into a continuously moving picture the way he would be in viewing a film.
174
Ibid., 39.
175
Kodak’s slides and projection systems were first manufactured in 1939, following the invention of
Kodachrome film in 1935. Kodachrome produced an accurate color spectrum that facilitated clear and
luminous transparencies. Automated projectors came to market in the 1960s. In September 2004,
Kodak announced that it would cease manufacture of the standard slide projector. Darsie Alexander,
79
that the slide tape prevents the creation of a sense of visual authenticity, obviating the
possibility of a viewer’s becoming swept up in (or sutured into) the jerky, noisy
parade of images to perceive a narrative. This allows the release of “imaginative”
and “cognitive” possibilities in the viewer. In Benjamin’s terms, the disruption works
to “produce an outside to the totality of technologized space.” 176 This physical
unfolding that permits perception of the interstices of the slide tape, then, allows for
an experience that may be similar to the experience that the magic lantern provided,
in that there is an opening—a fissure, a rupture, a gap—that provides space for the
viewer to invent or dream while experiencing Coleman’s art.
Krauss’s recent investigation of William Kentridge’s “drawings for
projection,” in which the artist photographs drawings that he continually erases and
revises to create a jerky narrative flow, valorizes the artist’s physical “shuttling” back
and forth between his drawings and his movie camera, producing palimpsests by
means of continuous drawings and erasures, a method that is both mechanical and
meditational. The momentary stillness between images drags “against the flow of the
film,” and produces gaps that do not exist in the totalizing medium of film. Krauss
credited Kentridge, as Coleman, for having invented a medium on the basis of
outmoded supports—the handcraft of drawing and the movie camera. The physical
process of producing this art partakes of the prehistory of animation, a regressive
move involving the combination of technology and the human body of which the
Frankfurt School would approve. 177 Krauss uses terms such as infiltrate, infect,
“SlideShow,” in and Introduction to SlideShow (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2005), 5-6; xxi.
176
Krauss, “Reinventing ‘Photography,’” 39.
177
Ibid., 20.
80
penetrate, invade and permeate to express this mixture of second and first natures,
meaning the mechanical and the organic. Moreover, the images have the look of
outmoded mass culture of the Weimar period, an indirect reference to Benjamin’s
theories. Kentridge’s method, or medium, also relies on Barthes’s third meaning, as
Kentridge’s still images disrupt the film’s forward motion, or narrative. Thus,
Krauss’s reasons for approving of this unique technical support track her valorization
of the work of James Coleman, and rely on the same earlier twentieth-century
theorists for support. With Kentridge, as with Coleman, there is the possibility of a
glimpse of “an outside to the totality of technologized space” in an age when digital
technology has changed everything. 178 The notion of a totality, or art that is
“totalizing” is also an issue in considering Jeff Wall’s medium.
Krauss Rewrites Clement Greenberg’s Concept of Medium
As important as is Krauss’s positioning of James Coleman and William
Kentridge as resisting the feeble forms of the traditional mediums, Krauss’s
meditation on medium in Voyage on the North Sea was her boldest move: an attack
on the Greenbergian story of modernism and the “triumph of the monochrome.” 179
This attack involved a reassessment, really a rewriting, of Clement Greenberg’s essay
“Modernist Painting.” Krauss has claimed that Greenberg had actually “jettisoned the
materialist, purely, reductive notion of the medium” by embracing the notion of
opticality, which Krauss asserts placed the “import of painting on the vector that
connects viewer and object.” She assessed this as a move to horizontality, derived
178
Ibid., 33-34. Here Krauss referred to her “Reinventing the Medium.”
“The modernist story that yielded the supposed ‘triumph’ of the monochrome believed that it had
produced this totalization in an object that was utterly coextensive with its own origins: surface and
support in an indivisible unity; the medium of painting so reduced to zero that nothing was left but an
object.” Krauss, Voyage on the North Sea, 53.
179
81
from his reference to the “optical third dimension” created by the first mark on the
canvas. According to Krauss, “opticality” was
an entirely abstract, schematized version of the link that traditional
perspective had formerly established between viewer and object, but
one that now transcends the real parameters of measurable, physical
space to express the purely projective powers of a preobjective level of
sight: “vision itself.” 180
What is astounding is Krauss’s claim that in the 1960s opticality became a
new medium, an idea, she admits, that neither Greenberg nor Fried theorized or even
recognized. 181 What this move permits, however, is the assertion that modernist
painting of that decade, and color field in particular, was actually “internally
differentiated,” even though no one saw it. Krauss’s arguments in praise of the selfdiffering works of artists such as James Coleman and William Kentridge are
grounded in her notion of “medium-specificity,” which, in turn, grows out of the
nature of their arts’ literal material supports—a very Greenbergian notion. But rather
than move away from Greenberg’s position, Krauss has reinterpreted his statements
about the nature of medium to make it sound as if he had been speaking her language.
It pulls Greenberg’s newly problematized notion of medium into Krauss’s theories of
medium in postmodernity.
180
Ibid., 29. In the quoted phrase, Krauss was citing Thierry de Duve’s account of Greenberg’s
reaction to Minimalism.
181
“Thus it could be argued that in the ‘60s, ‘opticality’ was also serving as more than just a feature of
art; it had become a medium of art. As such it was also aggregative, an affront to what was officially
understood as the reductivist logic of modernism—a logic and doctrine attributed to this day to
Greenberg himself. Neither Greenberg nor Fried theorized colorfield painting as a new medium,
however; they spoke of it only as a new possibility for abstract painting.…And certainly the fact that in
both cases the specificity of a medium was being maintained even though it would now have to be seen
as internally differentiated… was not theorized either. Ibid., 30.
82
Krauss first theorized what she considered a misreading of Greenberg’s notion
of medium in her 1999 essay, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” appropriating the title
of Greenberg’s 1948 essay. 182 Krauss asserted that the misreading was the following:
This was the decision to produce the most hypostatized possible
reading of the outcome of what Greenberg called the “crisis of the
easel picture” by understanding the modernist idea of medium
specificity as the radical contraction of specificity itself into a physical
characteristic (flatness) that would coincide with a material object: the
painting, which could now be seen as equivalent either to a
sculpture…or to a readymade….This literalized understanding
emptied out the idea of an aesthetic medium by simply making that
medium synonymous with its material support. 183
She asserted further that Greeenberg had dissolved the picture “in the fluid of what he
was sometimes calling ‘openness,’ at others ‘opticality,’ and ultimately, though
perhaps least satisfactorily, ‘color field.’ Which is to say, that no sooner had
Greenberg seemed to isolate the essence of painting in flatness, than he swung the
axis of the field 90 degrees to the actual picture surface to place all the import of
painting on the vector that connects viewer and object.” 184 Speaking of Thierry de
Duve’s reading of Greenberg’s reaction to Minimalism, Krauss stated that it
“scants…the way Greenberg understood the category of opticality as a support for
practice, and thus, though he never says this, a medium.” 185 (Emphasis added.)
A careful reading of Greenberg’s essays cited by Krauss does not support her
characterization. In Greenberg’s discussions of opticality and openness, the picture
might have been leaking beyond the frame, but it did not traverse a horizontal vector
182
Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 2: 221-25.
Greenberg’s essay described the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey, focusing on the allover picture that emphasized the surface and rendered every part of the canvas “equivalent.”
183
Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” 164.
184
Ibid., 165.
185
Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 59n24.
83
extending to the viewer. It remained essentially flat. In his “Crisis of the Easel
Picture,” Greenberg did not discuss opticality, thus Krauss’s very appropriation of the
title was misleading. In the 1956 essay, “Symposium: Is the French Avant-Garde
Overrated?” Greenberg noted the “fresher, opener, more immediate surface” of
American painting, and said, “Whether it is enamel reflecting light, or thinned paint
soaked into unsized and unprimed canvas, the surface breathes. There is no
insulating finish, nor is pictorial space created ‘pictorially,’ by deep, veiled color, but
rather by blunt corporeal contrasts and less specifiable optical illusion.” 186 Greenberg
was describing flat paintings made with enamel or thin paint. The reference to
“optical illusion” is one that Greenberg often repeated, and that I would argue is
related to his intractable idea that viewing a painting is solely a visual or optical
experience. Further, for Greenberg, pictorial space, if any, was space that seemed to
recede rather than project.
In “American-Type Painting,” Greenberg described the “emphatic flatness” of
the paintings of Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. 187 In their works,
“the color breathes from the canvas with an enveloping effect, which is intensified by
the largeness itself of the picture.” This may be the closest Greenberg came to
suggesting that something in the picture reaches toward the spectator, who “tends to
react to this more in terms of décor or environment than in those usually associated
with a picture hung upon a wall.” But, here, Greenberg was speaking primarily about
the scale of the painting and its decorative effects, in contrast to the traditional easel
186
Clement Greenberg, “Symposium: Is the French Avant-Garde Overrated?” in Collected Essays and
Criticism, 2: 156.
187
Clement Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 3: 232: “A
concomitant of the fact that Still, Newman, and Rothko suppress value contrasts and favor warm hues
is the more emphatic flatness of their paintings.”
84
picture, or tableau, that is clearly delimited and marked off from the wall by its frame.
In speaking of the same artists again in “After Abstract Expressionism,” Greenberg
emphasized the large sizes of the canvases and the warm hues, with the ultimate
effect of “an almost literal openness that embraces and absorbs color in the act of
being created by it.” “Size guarantees the purity as well as the intensity needed to
suggest indeterminate space: more blue simply being bluer than less blue.” 188 Again,
Greenberg was speaking of a purely visual impact: “Openness, and not only in
painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time.” In
this essay, Greenberg repeated the refrain established in “Modernist Painting” two
years earlier:
By now it has been established, it would seem, that the irreducible
essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or
norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness; and that the
observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object
which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched or tacked-up
canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily a successful
one. 189
In describing the painting of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Greenberg
spoke of color in expanding the picture plane:
The effect conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied,
and therefore more purely optical, but also of color as a thing that
opens and expands the picture plane. The suppression of the
difference between painted and unpainted surfaces causes pictorial
space to leak through—or rather, to seem about to leak through—the
framing edges of the picture into the space beyond them. 190
It seems clear that the apparent expansion of the painting that Greenberg described is
lateral and vertical along the picture plane: the color of the painting does not form a
188
Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” 131.
Ibid., 131-32.
190
Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, 4: 97.
189
85
horizontal vector along which it reaches toward the viewer, but leaks beyond the
frame to the wall on either side, and, perhaps, on all four sides. Greenberg went on to
state the necessity of a large format for abstract color painting. The reason for this is
“the need to have the picture occupy so much of one’s visual field that it loses its
character as a discrete tactile object and thereby becomes that much more purely a
picture, a strictly visual entity.” (Emphasis added.) 191
The point here is that Greenberg was very much concerned with the notion of
opticality, by which he meant the perception of a painting with the eye. Color field
painting, with its lack of visual incident and its large scale, was extremely “optical,”
and coincided with his long-held view that art should successfully attack the sensory
organs to which it was directed. The emphasis on opticality was derived from
Greenberg’s theories of the importance of the separation of the arts that he explored
beginning in 1940 in “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” It was an essential aspect of his
ideas about the arts and their processes of self-criticism and “purification,” and so
must be hammered home. Greenberg admitted in “Modernist Painting” that in order
to make his point, he had had to simplify and exaggerate:
The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never
be an absolute flatness. The heightened sensitivity of the picture plane
may no longer permit sculptural illusion, or trompe-l’oeil, but it does
and must permit optical illusion. The first mark made on a canvas
destroys its literal and utter flatness, and the result of the marks made
on it by an artist like Mondrian is still a kind of illusion that suggests a
kind of third dimension. Only now it is a strictly pictorial, strictly
optical third dimension….The…illusion created by the Modernist
painter can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literally or
figuratively, only with the eye. The latest abstract painting tries to
fulfill the Impressionist insistence on the optical as the only sense that
a completely and quintessentially pictorial art can invoke.192
191
192
Ibid.
Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 90.
86
Further, “That visual art should confine itself exclusively to what is given in visual
experience, and make no reference to anything given in any other order of experience,
is a notion whose only justification lies in scientific consistency.” 193
This did not mean that there was a “third dimension,” as Krauss has posited.
Her grafting of an optical horizontal vector onto Greenberg’s ideas about painting that
he, she admits, did not theorize or even say, is a puzzling and unconvincing attempt to
align Greenberg’s notion of medium with her own arguments regarding the
operational nature of postmodern medium specificity. As evidenced by the
foregoing, Greenberg was focused on the flat surface of paintings that, to be sure,
created optical illusions. But color field painting was not an excavation of an art
practice that revealed a latent promise present at the inception of easel painting in the
Renaissance, or that could release a cognitive or imaginative or intellectual
experience in the viewer. For Greenberg, it was directed solely to the eye and
intended to create an immediate aesthetic visual sensation. Moreover, he never
entered into the discourse of Postmodernism and the linguistic and deconstructive
theories that have characterized it. For Greenberg, painting in the 1960s had pared
itself down; it was not an excavation or deconstruction of a worn-out or obsolescent
modality. His early and late writings bear this out. 194
Having “excavated” Rosalind Krauss’s ideas about medium at the end of the
century by tracing their development from the 1970s when photography, for her,
assumed the role of theoretical object, reprising its role in the earlier part of the
193
Ibid., 91.
See, generally, Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, which includes writings from 1970
to 1994.
194
87
century, one sees that the only mediums that Krauss has found adequate are those that
are grounded in physical processes embedded in outmoded or nearly obsolescent
forms of technology and popular culture. These “reinvented” mediums must create
temporal gaps—ruptures—within their physical supports that permit viewers to
glimpse something outside the technological spectacle that defines contemporary
culture. 195 Finding a way to reinvent a medium meeting those criteria is difficult, and
Krauss has declared that Jeff Wall has not succeeded.
Jeff Wall’s Medium
Jeff Wall began to make his signature transparencies in 1978, at the very
moment that the critical discourse around photography and painting began to build
steam. Given Wall’s incorporation of characteristics of figurative painting and
techniques of cinema into his photographic praxis, it is essential to examine how he
positions himself with regard to medium, and how art historians have dealt with the
complexity of his art in that regard.
The physical support, or material, of Jeff Wall’s “medium” is the large-scale
photographic color transparency mounted in an aluminum box illuminated from
behind by fluorescent light. Although various terms have been used to refer to the
physical nature of these works, in this study they will be generally referred to as
195
In “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition,” Krauss cited artists Christian Marclay and
Sophie Calle for having used modern, technological mechanisms as the supports for their art: Marclay,
for synch sound, which is the “technical support” of cinema; and Calle, for a combination of
photography and text, mimicking investigative journalists’ documentary research. Krauss explained
her substitution of the term “technical support” for “medium,” as follows: “If the traditional medium is
supported by a physical substance…the term “technical support,” in distinction, refers to contemporary
commercial vehicles, such as cars or television, which contemporary artists exploit, in recognition of
the contemporary obsolescence of the traditional mediums, as well as acknowledging their obligation
to wrest from that support a new set of aesthetic conventions to which their works can then reflexively
gesture, should they want to join those works to the canon of modernism.” Idem, 57. Krauss had used
the term “technical support” earlier in “…And Then Turn Away?,” 32.
88
“transparencies.” 196 The physical basis of the work is photography, but its
presentation in an aluminum box and backlit was derived directly from commercial
advertising. Wall has described an epiphanic moment during a trip to Spain in 1977:
“I kept seeing these back-lit things at the bus terminals. And it just clicked that those
back-lit pictures might be a way of doing photography that would somehow connect
these elements of scale and the body that were important to Judd and Newman and
Pollock, as well as Velasquez, Goya, Titian or Manet.” 197 Wall’s references to
painters of the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries as well as to minimalist artist
Donald Judd presage some of the ways in which writers as well as Wall himself have
approached the multi-layered medium of his art. They have compared it to painting,
sculpture, theater, cinema, television, advertising, drawing and writing. Before
examining the conundrums of those attempts to pin down Wall’s medium, it is
instructive to see how he initially described it.
Wall completed a master’s thesis in art history titled “Berlin Dada and the
Notion of Context” at the University of British Columbia in 1970, and did doctoral
research in art history on Marcel Duchamp and John Heartfield at the Courtauld
196
These works have been variously described over the years, and Wall has settled on the term
“transparency in lightbox.” They are made on Ilfochrome Classic transparent material. (“Ilfochrome”
was formerly “Cibachrome.”) Wall’s oeuvre consists of two kinds of photographs: “Cinematographic
photographs” are works, whether black and white or in color, are those “in which the subject of the
picture has been prepared in some way, ranging from minimal modifications to the construction of
entire sets, creation of costumes and objects, etc.” “Documentary photographs” are those “in which
the artist chooses the location and time of the picture but without any kind of intervention on his part.”
Both cinematographic photographs and documentary photographs may be altered by digital montage.
“Introductory Notes,” in JWCR, 271-73.
197
Sheena Wagstaff, “The Labouring Eye,” in Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978-2004 (London: Tate
Publishing, 2005), 7. The trip to Spain had included viewing works by Velasquez, Goya and Titian at
the Prado. See also Robert Enright, “The Consolation of Plausibility: An Interview with Jeff Wall,
Border Crossings 19, no. 1 (1999): 45. In a 1985 interview, Wall expressed his discovery this way:
“Just at that moment I saw an illuminated sign somewhere, and it struck me very strongly that here was
the perfect synthetic technology for me. It was not photography, it was not cinema, it was not painting,
it was not propaganda, but it has strong associations with them all.” Wall, in Barents, 99.
89
Institute of Art in London from 1970 to 1973. 198 His familiarity with German and
Russian cultural theorists of the early twentieth century, particularly Walter Benjamin
and Berthold Brecht, has surfaced frequently in his interviews and writings. 199 In
fact, the neon glow of back-lit transparencies in bus stations that Wall described calls
to mind a segment of Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street” in which Benjamin
described the impact of neon advertisements:
The genuine advertisement hurls things at us with the tempo of a good
film….What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to
criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool
reflecting it in the asphalt. 200
This is not to argue that Wall had this passage in mind when he decided on his lighted
technical support, but to suggest a connection between Benjamin and Wall that has
run through Wall’s art, writings and interviews as well as others’ critical assessments.
Jeff Wall’s first solo exhibition took place at the Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria from April 11 to June 3, 1979, 201 and consisted of the installation of his first
Cibachrome transparency works, dating from 1977 to 1979. 202 The use of backlit
198
Robert Linsley and Verena Auffermann, Jeff Wall: The Storyteller, exh. cat. (Frankfurt: Museum
fur Moderne Kunst, 1992), 63, 71. Wall made little art from 1971 until 1977. JWCR, “Biography,”
np.
199
See, for example, Jeff Wall, “Gestus,” in de Duve, et al., 76; previously published in A Different
Climate: Aspects of Beauty in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Stadtisches Kunsthalle, 1984);
“Unity and Fragmentation in Manet,” Parachute no. 35 (June-July-August 1984): 5-7; and “An
Outline of a Context for Stephan Balkenhol’s Work,” in Stephan Balkenhol, exh. cat. (Frankfurt:
Portikus, 1988).
200
Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 476. This segment,
titled “This Space for Rent,” alludes to numerous issues important to Benjamin, including the impact
of film and the effects of capitalism on the “man in the street.” In different ways, those topics are also
important to Wall.
201
The Destroyed Room (1978), the first color transparency within Wall’s extant oeuvre, was displayed
that year at the Nova Gallery in Vancouver, where it was set into a wall built facing the gallery
window and lighted from within the gallery. It could only be seen from the street, so that it appeared
to be a commercial window display. A lightbox was supplied later. Faking Death, (1977), a triptych
that was actually Wall’s first color transparency, was included in the 1978 exhibition, as well as ones
in 1979 and 1980, after which it was removed from his oeuvre. JWCR, 275.
202
Faking Death (1977) (three panels); The Destroyed Room (1978); Young Worker, (1978) (four
panels); and Picture for Women (1979).
90
Cibachrome transparencies mounted in aluminum boxes was apparently the first use
of the ubiquitous advertising medium for ambitious art. Wall wrote the exhibition’s
catalogue essay titled “To the Spectator” in which he set forth his ambitions and
described his art. 203
In terms that reflect the strong influence of Benjamin, Wall referred to his
medium as a “delivery system,” and dwelled on its source in the commercial world of
advertising and public signs. Wall spoke of how advertising has shown how the
“repositioning” of the “apparatus” from the factory to that of the “traditionally selfconscious picture…creates conditions for its critical reapprehension within the
context of art.” He emphasized the effect of the light, noting that the even diffusion
of the fluorescent light produced no shadows and had an uncanny, Frankensteinian
effect on human body tones. He referred to the “physically unstable, vibratory,
irritating character” of fluorescent light in everyday life that produced in the viewer a
“restless passivity:”
I’m bothered by and interested in the kind of restless passivity induced
in people by overhead fluorescent-lit spaces. These states correspond
to the roles the same people are required and encouraged to play by the
institutions which illuminate their precincts in this way. I’m thinking
of factories, offices and schools, but also of kitchens and bathrooms,
public and private, the stages on which “nature takes its course.”
Wall compared the effect of his works to those of television that can physically
illuminate space and dominate the viewer ideologically. Finally, in the list of the
works included in the catalogue, the two that consist of only one large panel—The
Destroyed Room and Picture for Women—were described as “Seamed cibachrome
203
Jeff Wall, “To the Spectator,” in Jeff Wall: Installation of Faking Death [1978] The Destroyed
Room [1978] Young Workers [1978] Picture for Women [1979] (Victoria, B.C.: Art Gallery of Greater
Victoria, 1979), np.
91
transparency, fluorescent light.” The word “seamed” directs attention to the material
support, and, particularly, to an artifact of the technology that is unavoidable even
today in transparencies of this size, which is the requirement of joining two
transparencies with clear tape in order to produce such images. 204 A seam implies a
rupture, and emphasizes the constructed nature of these works.
Although Wall did not cite Walter Benjamin in this short essay, the
terminology regarding his medium—production, apparatus, delivery system,
structure, seamed, appropriation—and his focus on the commercial nature of his
fluorescent lighting system recall Benjamin’s interest in the technology of
photography and film and their effects on those who view it. Given the fact that Wall
had studied on a graduate level the art theories of the early twentieth century when art
and mechanical production and reproduction were so intertwined, it is not surprising
that his approach to making artwork in the late 1970s might self-consciously draw
from those influences and experiences.
Benjamin’s Artwork Essay and “The Author as Producer” come to mind as
Wall talks about the physical process of his art production. 205 In the latter essay
Benjamin spoke of the “functional transformation” of “the apparatus of production,”
whether for writing, music or theater. Functional transformation, or
“umfunktionierung,” a word coined by Berthold Brecht according to Benjamin, is
204
The Destroyed Room is 134.7 by 198.1 cm., and Picture for Women is 149.9 by 200.7 cm. The
seams in Wall’s works are not apparent in reproductions, but are obvious to a viewer confronting them
in person. Wall has written of the structural and metaphorical aspects of the seam in those two early
works. JWCR, 278, quoting Wall, “The Destroyed Room, Picture for Women,” in Directions 1981
(Washington, D. C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1981), 181.
205
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 2: 768-82.
92
essential to giving a work a revolutionary use value. 206 With regard to photography,
Benjamin looked upon photomontage as a revolutionary form, specifically referring
to John Heartfield, “whose technique made the book cover into a political
instrument.” In speaking of a still life “put together from tickets, spools of cotton and
cigarette butts” he said “the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than
painting.” 207 Benjamin criticized New Objectivity photography, a style that had
“transformed even abject poverty…into an object of enjoyment.” 208 According to
Benjamin, “what we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the
caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful
value.” 209
Although the foregoing does not pretend to do justice to the complexity of
“The Author as Producer,” the point of raising it here is to show how Wall staked out
his position as he made and wrote about his first four transparencies—an artist as
producer—in correspondence with issues presented by Benjamin. He made art that is
based on technology, particularly photography and film, and that has a cognitive use.
Chapter Three will show that the subjects of Wall’s works of the 1980s include
overtly political and social, if not revolutionary, content. It will show that Wall drew
from the theories embedded in the concept of epic theater invented by Berthold
Brecht, who influenced Benjamin to a large degree with regard to how the form of an
artwork could influence viewers’ cognition. Chapter Three will show as well that
206
In “Notes from Svendborg, Summer 1934,” Benjamin stated that “the theory [in “The Author as
Producer” is] that a decisive criterion of a revolutionary function of literature lies in the extent to
which technical advances lead to a transformation of artistic forms and hence of intellectual means of
production.” Ibid., 783.
207
Ibid., 774.
208
Ibid., 775.
209
Ibid.
93
Wall’s essay “Gestus” draws directly upon the ideas of Brecht on the efficacy of
gesture in conveying meaning, and that many of Wall’s works of the 1980s
demonstrate this thinking.
Wall’s obvious focus on himself as a producing artist importing commercial
technology into ambitious art have opened him to the kinds of criticism leveled by
writers such as Rosalind Krauss and T. J. Clark, both of whom take the position that
Benjamin’s theories are applicable to contemporary art. Wall has complicated the
task for those writers by importing subjects and compositional forms of “high” art
derived from nineteenth-century France, for example, into this late-twentieth-century
practice. In “To the Spectator,” Wall spoke not only of technology, but related his
work to the history of pictorial art: “I think of the field in terms of the theoretical
issues posed by the historical development of the means of production of
representation or signification.” He saw his work as “antagonistically unifying” high
art and show business: “Pictures in the art context are necessarily open to, and
constructed out of, elements, texts, or readings generated across the horizon of
common or popular as well as academic forms of literacy.” Thus, Wall took on the
ambitious goal of repositioning the history of pictorial art within the world of mass
entertainment, marketing and popular media: “This mode of photography finds itself
always in a profound relationship with the history of painting and sculpture.” He has
also spoken of his desire to make beautiful pictures, a goal that flies in the face of the
ideas of Walter Benjamin and of contemporary art historians such as Rosalind Krauss
and Benjamin Buchloh who follow his lead. 210
210
In this regard, in 1981, Wall drafted an essay on Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel that was rejected for
the catalogue for which it was intended, but was later published. It sets forth Wall’s complex
94
The startling combination of technology and art history embodied in Jeff
Wall’s transparencies has engendered myriad commentaries that purport to define his
medium. In “To the Spectator,” Wall himself mentioned photography, television,
films made for television, painting, sculpture, and the everyday atmosphere created
by fluorescent light, as bearing on his work and presaging the debate that has
followed. He has spoken also of how the making of his art resembles
cinematography. 211 His choice of the term “cinematographic photography” for the
pictures he constructs reinforces that analogy.
Wall’s Medium Critiqued
Art historians and critics have been concerned with the medium of Wall’s
work from a variety of perspectives, but primarily as it relates to painting. A
complete survey of those many comparisons is not warranted, but it is useful to
provide a sample of the extensive efforts to define Wall’s work in terms of art
historical traditions. Since certain of Wall’s early works invoked the compositions of
nineteenth-century French paintings, criticism often has described it in terms of
painting and painting genres without much concern with its actual physical support.
relationship to the critical theories of the early twentieth century in its criticism of the “defeatist”
position taken by Benjamin Buchloh in his reliance on the post-World War II writings of Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Here, early in his career, Wall staked out his position with regard to
producing art with aesthetic qualities that is also socially critical. Jeff Wall, “A Draft for ‘Dan
Graham’s Kammerspiel,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2007), 11-29.
211
“I thought about my pictures in terms of cinematography, rather than photography proper or maybe
art-photography, as it had been defined by the powers that were up until around 1970. My ‘straight’ or
‘direct’ photos, ones that don’t involve digital technology, seemed to be analogous to the whole
cinematographic process but without any editing. Digital technology allows you to put different pieces
together after the shooting is finished, so it is something like film editing.” Jeff Wall, “Wall Pieces:
Jeff Wall interviewed by Patricia Bickers,” Art Monthly 179 (September 1994): 4.
95
Thierry de Duve described the works as “composed like classical paintings, in
a unitary, seamless space.” 212 He said, also, that the large format transparency “is the
pictorial concept of the tableau,” suggesting an approach consonant with that of JeanFrançois Chevrier. Although de Duve acknowledged that Wall had created for
himself a “double bind” by reflecting in his works painting’s self-critical moves
toward modernism that began with Manet, he tended to neutralize this complexity by
tying specific works of Wall to particular paintings of Poussin, Monet, Cezanne, Van
Gogh, and, of course, Manet. De Duve employed terms such as “filtered through,”
and “in dialogue with” painting, thus emphasizing the connections. Although de
Duve ended by claiming that Wall’s works constitute “dialectical images,” a phrase
directly associated with Benjamin, his litany of comparisons with painting, and
particularly with landscape, which de Duve said stands for painting in general, set
him for up Rosalind Krauss’s diatribe against Wall as a mere “pasticheur,” as
discussed below.
Norman Bryson suggested that Wall was producing paintings within
photography and reinventing the classical genres, 213 and T. J. Clark asserted that Wall
was salvaging the tradition of painting. 214 Others who have written in such terms
include Lucie Beyer, Beatrice Parent and Terry Atkinson, along with Gijs van Tuyl (a
painter working with photography); Roger Seamon (color belongs to painting) and
212
Thierry de Duve, “The Mainstream and the Crooked Path,” in Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc,
Boris Groys and Jean-François Chevrier, Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 2002), 26, 27.
213
Norman Bryson, “Too Near, Too Far,” Parkett no. 49 (May 1997): 85-89, 85: “Jeff Wall’s retention
of a history of painting within his photographic practice has the interesting consequence that his work
follows the classical system of the genres with unusual fidelity.”
214
T. J. Clark, “Three Excerpts from a Discussion with T. J. Clark, Claude Gintz, Serge Guilbaut and
Anne Wagner,” Parkett 22 (1989): 82-85.
96
Jean-Christophe Ammann (light corresponds to the effect of artificial light in
paintings). 215
Writers who have focused on Wall’s later work, when he began producing
digitalized images in the early 1990s, have compared it to drawing and painting, as
well as to film editing. 216 Wall has frequently referred to the influence of film, and in
the following statement, acknowledged the relationships of his digitalized work to
both film and painting:
I have always envied the way a painter can work on his picture a little
bit at a time, always keeping the totality in mind by stepping back
from his work for a glance at it. A painting is never the rendering of a
moment in time, but an accumulation of actions which simulates a
moment or creates the illusion of an event occurring before our eyes.
By opening up the photographic moment, the computer begins to blur
the boundaries between the forms and creates a new threshold zone
which interests me greatly. 217
Other references to cinema include Patricia Bickers (Wall thinks in terms of
cinematography); Ian Wallace (his work is comparable to cinematic absorption; is in
a cinematic mode); and Lisa Joyce and Fred Orton (Wall’s is an art of
cinematography). 218 Arielle Pelenc has also suggested that Wall’s transparencies,
particularly the gestures of his figures, have a cinematographic character. 219
215
Lucie Beyer, “Jeff Wall,” FlashArt, no. 136 (October 1987): 95; Beatrice Parent, “Light and
Shadow: Christian Boltanski and Jeff Wall,” trans. Georgia Marsh, Parkett 22 (1989): 60-65; Terry
Atkinson, “Dead Troops Talk,” in Jeff Wall: Dead Troops Talk, exh cat. (Basel: Wiese Verlag, 1993),
29-47, 32: “The dead troops do talk; what they talk is the language of political instruction. This picture
is one of Wall’s most powerful didactic and polemical works—worthy of the tradition of Gericault’s
‘Raft of the Medusa’ or Manet’s ‘The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian.’”; Gijs van Tuyl,
Introduction to Jeff Wall: Landscapes and Other Pictures, trans. David Britt, exh. cat. (Wolfsburg:
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1996), 7; Roger Seamon, “The Uneasy Sublime,” Parachute 66 (April-June
1992): 11-19; Jean-Christophe Ammann, “Fascination Illuminated in Jeff Wall’s Work,” in Jeff Wall:
Transparencies, exh. cat. (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Basel: Kunsthalle, 1984), np.
216
Charles Reeve, “A Conversation with Jeff Wall,” Documents, no. 17 (Winter-Spring 2000): 6-16; 8.
217
Jeff Wall, L’Ere Binaire: Nouvelles Interactions, exh. cat., (Brussels: Musee Communal d’Ixelles,
1992), np.; quoted in Sheena Wagstaff, 15.
218
Bickers, 3; Ian Wallace, “Jeff Wall’s Transparencies,” in Jeff Wall: Transparencies, exh. cat.
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Basel: Kunsthalle, 1984), np; and Lisa Joyce and Fred Orton,
97
Several writers have seen Wall’s transparencies as literary, including Patricia
Bickers (the pictures have a subject); Jerry Zaslove (it is a dialogue between literature
and painting; it reflects the generational literacy of 1917 to 1985); and Robert Linsley
(The Storyteller is a literary form of philosophical dialogue).220
Perhaps the most strained reading of Wall’s work in terms of medium is
Briony Fer’s comparison of his works to sculpture, such as the minimalist works of
Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. She based this, in part, upon the demands placed on the
viewer by the three-dimensional nature of the lightboxes, as well as on an expanded
view of sculpture that takes into account what Fer termed the psychic spatial registers
that objects in the photographs inhabit. 221 Comparisons are made also to
documentary photographs of land art and to “Involuntary Sculptures,” the
photographs by Surrealist photographer Gyula Brassai.
The foregoing brief quotations seem to suggest that many authors see Wall’s
transparencies only in relation to a single medium. Most do see it primarily in terms
of the medium identified, but mention others as well. Furthermore, some analyze it in
terms of several. For example, Ian Wallace has referred to cinema, painting,
“‘Always Elsewhere’: An Introduction to the Art of Jeff Wall (A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in
October, 1947),” in Jeff Wall: Photographs, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2003), 8-33, 21. See,
also, Kerry Brougher, Art and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 119: “Jeff Wall’s Eviction Struggle (1988) is a synthesis of
panorama, history painting and cinematic melodrama….Not only does he build on classic painterly
composition, but he also incorporates elements that recall moments from films by Godard, Antonioni,
and other directors.”
219
Arielle Pelenc, “Arielle Pelenc in Correspondence with Jeff Wall,” in de Duve, et al, 10.
220
Jerry Zaslove, “Faking Nature and Reading History: The Mindfulness Toward Reality in the
Dialogical World of Jeff Wall’s Pictures,” in Gary Dufour, Jeff Wall: 1990 (Vancouver: Vancouver
Art Gallery, 1990), 66,78; and Robert Linsley, “Jeff Wall: The Storyteller,” in Robert Linsley and
Verena Auffermann, Jeff Wall: The Storyteller (Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 1992), 25.
221
Briony Fer, “The Space of Anxiety: Sculpture and Photography in the Work of Jeff Wall,” in
Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234-245; previously published in slightly abbreviated form as
“The Space of Anxiety,” in Jeff Wall, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Chicago: Museum
of Contemporary Art; Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 1995), 23-26.
98
propaganda, advertising and everyday life: “His consistent and specific use of highresolution Cibachrome transparencies offers the spectacle of deep pictorial illusion,
and through this he calls up within his carefully constructed images, a plethora of
signs that refer to codes of cinema, painting, propaganda, advertising and everyday
life.” 222 John Roberts discussed Wall’s work in terms of the novel and cinema. 223
But Jeff Wall, perhaps, has best summed up the hybridity of his praxis:
I think it’s possible, through the complex effects of techniques derived
from painting, cinema and theatre, to infuse the photographic medium
with this dialectic of identity and non-identity. 224
And as long as painting remains “painted drama”—which it always
does, in my opinion—then these issues of the dramas of the past and
their representations in the present, whether staged or painted or
photographed, must be at the centre of the problematics of painting
and its relations with other technologies of representation. 225
Finally, Wall has said,
Photography, cinema, and painting have been interrelated since the
appearance of the newer arts, and the aesthetic criteria of each are
informed by the other two media to the extent that it could be claimed
that there is almost a single set of criteria for the three art forms. 226
As suggested by Wall’s statements, his transparencies most crucially embed
the notions of representation and depiction. As discussed above, he sees the essential
nature of photography as depiction. Having chosen the medium of photography in
the form of the spectacular backlit transparency, he set out to make pictures.
Although the scale and spectacularity of the works suggest film or even theater,
Wall’s references to particular nineteenth-century paintings in his works of the 1980s
222
Wallace, Ibid.
John Roberts, “Jeff Wall: The Social Pathology of Everyday Life,” in The Art of Interruption:
Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester, U.K: Manchester University Press, 1998), 189.
224
Wall, in Barents, 102.
225
Ibid., 96.
226
Wall, “Frames of Reference,” 190.
223
99
at issue in this study, along with their frankly pictorial nature, link them primarily to
the medium of painting.
Wall began early an artistic and critical engagement with Manet, using his
paintings as starting points, including Picture for Women (1979), Stereo (1980) and
Woman and Her Doctor (1980-81), which are, from the standpoint of composition,
contemporary reconfigurations of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Olympia and
In the Conservatory, respectively.
Wall has said that he “forced a parallel with painting” in the mid-1970s to
open up a space to work and to connect with the use of figure in the tradition of
painting from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, saying that the “close-up
vantage point” invented by painting has rarely been used in photography except in
advertising, where it is designed to have maximum impact. 227
Wall stages his photographed scenes in studio space constructed at his
direction to create a particular kind of interior, or on locations in or near Vancouver
that he searches out as would a film director. The persons appearing in the pictures
are performers hired and directed by Wall, and they are rehearsed to achieve the
effects he seeks. Photographs taken outdoors may take days to shoot in order to take
advantage of particular weather conditions. 228 Thus, Wall approaches the production
of his transparencies as a film director would approach the shooting of a film scene.
The large scale and drama of the transparencies have caused them to be described as
cinematic, or, perhaps more accurately, as film stills, and Wall has discussed the
227
Reeve, 7-8.
The Flooded Grave (1998-2000), a scene in a cemetery in which a trench is filled with water and
various examples of living sea life, took two years to create and photograph. The process is described
in Jan Tumlir, “The Hole Truth—Jan Tumlir talks with Jeff Wall about The Flooded Grave,” Artforum
39, no. 7 (March 2001): 113-17.
228
100
influence of cinema on his work. 229 Their scale literally permits a number of viewers
to experience them simultaneously, another feature shared with cinema.
Since 1978, Wall’s work has intermingled characteristics of photography,
painting and film in ways that might suggest that they would fit within the
postmodernist paradigm elaborated by Douglas Crimp, who valorized a mix of
mediums in the making of art. But since Wall’s works are physically produced solely
by means of photographing scenes that he has either come upon or set up, they do not
utilize the specific kinds of “strategies of signification” that Crimp described. Thus,
in the most literal sense, they do not fit Crimp’s paradigm. Moreover, as a trained art
historian with a deep knowledge of art forms and theories of earlier periods that are
revealed in many works, Wall insists that he operates within the continuum of
Modernism, and refutes attempts to judge his work by postmodernist standards.
Chapter Three, however, explores ways in which Wall’s transparencies include
critical aspects that reveal a complexity that is not immediately apparent.
Rosalind Krauss on Jeff Wall
Rosalind Krauss has not addressed an essay to Jeff Wall’s work, yet, as
outlined earlier in this chapter, in some passing remarks, she has compared Wall
unfavorably to James Coleman on the basis of their respective mediums. Asserting
that photography was passing into obsolescence at this moment of “postconceptual,
‘postmedium’ production,” 230 the only possible use of photography for Krauss was
the reinvention, not the restoration, of a medium. Krauss appreciated Wall’s use of
the illuminated advertising panel as a “support for his postconceptual photographic
229
230
Wall, in Barents, 95; and Pelenc, 9-11.
Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 296.
101
practice,” because it is a “low-grade, low-tech commercial support.” But although
that that support might have been used as a way of reconsidering the idea of a
medium Wall, instead, returned to the medium of painting:
Thus though Wall’s activities are symptomatic of the present need to
reconsider the problem of the medium, they seem to partake of the
kind of revanchiste restoration of the traditional media that was so
characteristic of the 1980s. 231
She explained further: “Wall’s supporters see this staging [of nineteenth-century
paintings] as a strategy for reconnecting with tradition. I feel, however, that such a
reconnection is unearned by the works themselves and must therefore be
characterized, negatively, as pastiche.” 232 Here, Krauss aligned Wall’s photographic
works with those of artists who had returned to large-scale painting around 1980, and
had been severely criticized by Douglas Crimp as well as art historian Benjamin
Buchloh. 233
Krauss’s more vituperative and extensive criticism of Wall was included
initially as part of a catalogue essay written about the work of James Coleman, which
she removed at the request of the publisher and later published in October. 234 Having
been motivated by the “luminous seduction” of Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (A Vision
231
Ibid., 297.
Ibid., n14.
233
See Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism” and “The End of Painting.” See, also,
Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression.” Buchloh decried the revival of the pictorial in
neoexpressionist painting as bad art and bad politics: “The specter of derivativeness hovers over every
contemporary attempt to resurrect figuration, representation, and traditional modes of
production….The primary function of such cultural re-presentation is the confirmation of the hieratics
of ideological domination.” Buchloh saw in the return to representational picturing the recapitulation
of an earlier period in which artists had repudiated the procedures of fragmentation and pictorial
molecularization and the mechanization of pictorial production processes developed immediately after
World War I. While he was speaking in this essay of painting, and not large-scale, pictorial
photography, which was just beginning to materialize, I would argue that Buchloh would place the
1980s work of Jeff Wall in the same derided category as neoexpressionist painting, and would view it
as supporting the same late-capitalist hegemony.
234
Krauss, “…And Then Turn Away?” 32-33.
232
102
after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Mogor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) (199192) as she saw it on exhibit in the Louvre, Krauss said,
I am astonished all over again by the position taken by his supporters
when they argue that Wall simply returns to the moment when
painting was internally riven by modernism…and the drive for a
reflexive visual unity which proscribes narrative abruptly split itself
off from history painting….This is the point after which the portrayal
of modernity (the painting of modern life) comes into unbreachable
conflict with the aesthetic ambitions of modernism. Going back to
this moment, yet traveling over this same road but now as a
photographer, Wall’s restagings of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere
or Courbet’s Source of the Loue (or even more bizarrely, Poussin’s
Landscape with Diogenes) are seen as gaining access to a narrative
(and figurative) tradition that modernism simply, perversely,
interrupted. And not only do they argue that Wall has reforged a kind
of historical continuity, but that he has reconstituted the kind of
pictorial unity of the old master tableau, a unity in which composition
is able to weld a variety of elements seamlessly together. Thus does
Wall gaily vault over the unhappy choice modernism gave itself of
either gaining access to pictorial unity at the cost of narrative, threedimensional space (unity therefore lodged in the material conditions of
the surface), or admitting that such unity was irrevocably incompatible
with the texture of real experience by means of the strategies of
figurative dis-unity vested in collage and photo-montage.
Krauss continued by lamenting the failure of Wall’s supporters to analyze his medium
by treating him as having rehabilitated the medium of painting, thereby ignoring the
fact that he is a photographer. Thus, their analysis had focused on genres of painting
rather than those of photography, with a concomitant failure to engage with the
specificity of Wall’s actual medium. According to Krauss, both the supporters and
Wall himself assume that the “unassailable now of the photograph can be dilated
endlessly by the chatter of narrative, which not only suffuses Wall’s images insofar as
they produce themselves as ‘history paintings’ but is repeatedly thematized by the
works themselves: the soldiers telephoning in Dead Troops Talk, the conversation of
103
the two women in Diatribe…”. 235 The failure to deal specifically with his medium,
according to Krauss, “consigns his reworkings of old master art to nothing more
ambitious than pastiche.” 236
On Krauss’s terms, Wall failed on at least two counts. First, although he
made a good start by enlisting a low-tech, commercial support lacking an aesthetic
lineage, he ignored the specificity of that support by not devising an art practice
through a deconstruction of its very material. Rather, Wall turned to the history of
painting and, with contemporary scenes and costumes, used photography to
recapitulate well-known paintings created around the beginning of modernism. Thus,
for Krauss, his work is really a restoration of painting in another medium, and is as
useless, or as “revanchiste,” as the work of neoexpressionist painters of the 1980s.
The second problem, which is a subtext of the foregoing criticisms, is the
pictorial unity in Wall’s restored images. To repeat, “And not only do [Wall’s
supporters] argue that Wall has reforged a kind of historical continuity, but that he
has reconstituted the kind of pictorial unity of the old master tableau, a unity in which
composition is able to weld a variety of elements seamlessly together.” 237 For
Krauss, as argued above with respect to James Coleman and William Kentridge and
235
Ibid., 29. The phrase “traveling over this same road” seems to be a direct reference to Thierry de
Duve’s essay “The Mainstream and the Crooked Path,” in which he said, “It is as though Wall had
gone back to a fork in the roadway of history, to that very moment when, around Manet, painting was
registering the shock of photography; and as though he had then followed the route that had not been
taken by modern painting and had incarnated the painter of modern life as a photographer.” de Duve,
et al., 44-46. De Duve discussed Wall’s landscape photographs in terms of the history of modernism,
as mentioned above. His essay, first published in 1996, was the basis for his presentation at a
symposium entitled “Modernist Utopias: Postformalism and the Purity of Vision,” held in December
1995 in Montreal. There, speakers Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh castigated de Duve for
proposing continuity between a postmodern work (The Storyteller) and early modernism, and for his
use of the term “photographic transparency.” See Douglas Ord, “Magic Lanterns, Stars and No-Place:
The Symposium as Art Form,” Parachute 82 (April-May-June 1996): 62.
236
Krauss, “…And Then Turn Away?”, 29.
237
Ibid., 28.
104
as illustrated by the litany of terms that have been defined herein as “rupture,” the
notion of pictorial unity is an effect to be studiously avoided. The “pictorial unity” in
which composition “welds” elements “seamlessly together” is diametrically opposed
to the goal of fracturing imagery and disrupting the flow of narrative in, or the
apparent intelligibility of, a work of art. In Wall’s static transparencies, there is no
flow, as there is no motion that gaps or fissures in the technical support could disrupt.
In contrast to Coleman’s slide-tapes and Kentridge’s drawings for projection, there
are no interstices to work against the grain. There is only one big picture that
reinscribes visual narrative, or, at least, presumptive intelligibililty.
The “pictorial unity” in Wall’s phototransparencies has led certain other art
historians to criticize his work as “totalizing.” Krauss nods to those writers, T. J.
Clark in particular, when describing Wall’s work as a variety of elements welded
seamlessly together. 238 In its simplest terms, this critique relies on the assumption
that a unified picture such as a nineteenth-century history painting or a late twentiethcentury transparency by Jeff Wall leaves no opening for the viewer to experience
anything on his own, and, thus, is complicit with the dominant political and economic
order. As considered in Chapter Three, Wall answers those criticisms as they relate
to the criticality that he believes he has embedded within the subject matter and
human gestures in his pictures, using arguments that originated in the period to which
Krauss and Clark allude.
238
Ibid., n27: “For insofar as Wall tightly manipulates the relation between his images and their arthistorical sources, the viewer of this work becomes a subject rigidly controlled by Wall (as the single
subject/author).” Krauss was referring to an interview conducted in 1990 by T. J. Clark, Serge
Guilbaut and Anne Wagner, “Representation, Suspicions and Critical Transparency,” Parachute, no.
59 (July-August-September 1990): 4-10. See, also, the related interview “Jeff Wall: Three Excerpts
from a Discussion with T. J. Clark, Claude Gintz, Serge Guilbaut and Anne Wagner cited above.
105
Gerhard Richter’s Photopaintings
Turning to Gerhard Richter, whose painting praxis is deeply infected by
photography--a praxis as hybrid as Wall’s--it will be useful to see how one of his
preeminent critics has theorized Richter’s painting of pictures in the postmodern
period.
Gerhard Richter’s photopaintings 239 are produced by a nearly literal mixture
of painting and photography. His practice involves enlarging a photograph and
projecting it onto canvas. 240 Richter then paints the image, often omitting details and
adding other nuances. His early work, through the 1960s in particular, was painted in
shades of what Richter once called “non-color gray,” 241 typically excluding strong
blacks and whites. Some work has been painted in color. The final stage of the
process is the degradation of the clarity of the image by dragging a dry brush or
squeegee across the canvas to produce what has been termed the “blur.” 242
The critical role of photography in Richter’s painting praxis cannot be
overstated. Since the early 1960s, Richter has collected photographs from sources
such as magazines, newspapers, friends’ snapshots, family albums and his own
camerawork into an ever-growing archive that now numbers in the thousands. The
photographs, including those that have played important roles in his paintings, have
been compiled into an autonomous work referred to as Atlas that consists of original
239
Richter uses the term “photopainting.” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s
October 18, 1977, October 48 (Spring 1989): 89 n1. Richter’s Notes from 1964 indicate, however,
that an early term for this combination was “Photo Picture.” Richter, DPP, 22.
240
Richter, “Notes, 1964-1965,” in DPP, 35.
241
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Richter’s Abstractions: Silences, Voids, and Evacuations,” in Gerhard
Richter: Paintings from 2003-2005 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 2005), 22.
242
See, for example, Gertrude Koch, “The Richter-Scale of Blur,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 133-42, 136:
“Some of the motifs that recur in Richter’s pictures, photographs, and paintings take shape as
embodiments of a conscious preference for the out-of-focus, for the blurred. It is not simply a case of
imprecision; rather, it is the capture of a sliding glance.”
106
photographs, enlargements, reproductions and illustrations categorized generally by
content and form and mounted on panels for display. 243
Richter has valorized the photograph for its power to evoke reality. In his
Notes from 1964-1965, speaking of his painting praxis, Richter said the following
about the photograph:
It’s what everyone believes in nowadays: it’s “normal.” And if that
then becomes “other”, the effect is far stronger than any distortion, of
the sort you find in Dali’s figures or Bacon’s. Such a picture can
really scare you.
The photograph took the place of all those paintings, drawings and
illustrations that served to provide information about the reality that
they represented. A photograph does this more reliably and more
credibly than any painting. It is the only picture that tells the absolute
truth, because it sees “objectively”. It usually gets believed, even
where it is technically faulty and the content is barely identifiable.
(Emphasis added.)
The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is
absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style.
Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.
A photograph is taken in order to inform. What matters to the
photographer and to the viewer is the result, the legible information,
the fact captured in an image. Alternatively, the photograph can be
regarded as a picture, in which case the information conveyed changes
radically. However, because it is very hard to turn a photograph into a
picture simply by declaring it to be one, I have to make a painted
copy. 244
A photograph—unless the art photographers have “fashioned” it—is
simply the best picture that I can imagine. It is perfect; it does not
change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous and unconditional. It
has no style. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey
243
Atlas has been exhibited as a work in itself since 1972. An exhibition history is included in
Gerhard Richter, Atlas of the photographs collages and sketches, ed. Helmut Friedel and Ulrich
Wilmes (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1997), 374-83. An exhibition in Barcelona in 2000 is
pictured in B. H. D. Buchloh, J. F. Chevrier, A. Zweite and R. Rochlitz, Photography and Painting in
the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Consorci del Museu d’Art
Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000), 137.
244
Richter, “Notes, 1964-1965,” in DPP, 30-31.
107
information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be
identified. 245 (Emphasis added.)
The emphasized portions of the foregoing quotations are reminiscent of a
statement of André Bazin, a French writer on cinema, who also commented on the
power of even fuzzy photographs:
Painting is, after all, an inferior way of making likenesses, an ersatz of
the processes of reproduction. Only a photograph lens can give us the
kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need
man has to substitute for it something more than a mere
approximation….The photographic image is the object itself, the
object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No
matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in
documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very
process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the
reproduction; it is the model. 246 (Emphasis added.)
Yet, Richter paints, and he has suggested that painting and photography are
simply different ways of producing a picture:
It isn’t a different medium at all. It’s fundamentally the same. Of
course, a long time ago, I thought a picture was a picture only if it was
painted. Later on I found to my great surprise that I could see a
photograph as a picture—and in my enthusiasm I often saw it as the
better picture of the two. It functions in the same way: it shows the
appearance of something that is not itself—and it does it much faster
and more accurately. That certainly influenced my way of seeing, and
also my attitude to fabrication: for instance, the fact that it doesn’t
matter at all who took the photograph.
I meant the pictures to have this likeness to photography—if only for
the sake of the credibility that photographs have, especially black-andwhite ones. There’s something documentary about them. More than
any other kind of depiction, you believe in them. 247
245
Richter, Interview with Dieter Hülsmanns and Fridolin Reske, 1966,” in DPP, 56-57.
André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967),
14.
247
Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schutz, 1990,” DPP, 217-18. The quoted paragraphs are Richter’s
responses to questions about the use of photography as “an intermediary” to painting, and the fact that
the paintings appear “photographic.”
246
108
As a painter, Richter takes and saves photographs for the purpose of using
them as the sources for his painting. His lack of interest in who took the photograph
is eloquent testimony to the indifference, if not the antipathy, he feels toward “art”
photographs. He focuses on documentation in both the photographs and his “copies”
of them in paint. His early grisaille photopaintings, as indicated above, were made to
look like blurred photographs, which in Richter’s view have credibility even if
“technically faulty and the content barely identifiable.” The issue of the blur and the
distancing that Richter achieves by basing paintings on photographs is discussed in
Chapter Three in connection with the disillusionment that they create in their effect
on the viewer. The point here is that Gerhard Richter considers painting and
photography to be different ways of making pictures—of depicting—and has
developed a praxis that is an inextricable mixture—a fusion--of the two, although the
physical support, or product, is always a painting. The goal is to create a picture, and,
as with Wall’s view of his transparencies of the 1980s, which incorporate aspects of
photography and nineteenth-century paintings, the fact that Richter’s praxis involves
two mediums is of no theoretical consequence to the artist. Richter does not speak in
the terms of postmodernist critical discourse.
Critical Response to Richter’s Photopaintings
There is a great deal of writing on the art of Gerhard Richter, in significant
part because of the large number of exhibitions of his work that have been held in
Western Europe and the United States since 1964, including major international
exhibitions beginning with the Venice Biennale in 1972. 248 The writing tends to
248
In the United States, Richter’s first group exhibition took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in 1969, and his first one-person exhibition was held at the Reinhard Onnasch Gallery in New
109
focus on two major issues: Richter’s fusion of painting and photography, and the
relationship of his subject matter to the history of Germany, both before and after
World War II. Richter’s unique personal history, including his early years in what
became the German Democratic Republic, his move to the West in 1961 at age 29,
and his immediate transition from the Socialist Realist pictorial painting style in
which he had been trained, to photopaintings of banal, superficially Pop Art subjects,
has engendered speculation about the relationship between his work and his
bifurcated life during a tumultuous historical period.
Benjamin Buchloh, a fellow German who immigrated to the United States in
1977, has written extensively on Richter since 1976. 249 Buchloh’s doctoral
dissertation is a monograph on the artist, he has published numerous articles and
catalogue essays on Richter’s work and two interviews with the artist, and a book is
said to be forthcoming. 250 Moreover, Richter’s color photopainting Court Chapel,
York in 1973. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2002), 314-315. But Storr has acknowledged that Richter did not “fully emerge in his
own right” until the late 1980s, as a result of the polemics that had developed around the politics of
German painting since the late 1970s that made understanding Richter particularly difficult. For
example, Richter was not included in the exhibition “Expressions: New Art from Germany” organized
in 1983 by the St. Louis Art Museum and shown in five other cities. Ibid., 14-15.
249
Buchloh’s and Richter’s professional lives have intersected since 1975, when Buchloh began
teaching the history of contemporary art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where Richter had taught
since 1970. Their teaching also intersected at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax,
when Richter taught for a semester in 1977 at Buchloh’s invitation. Robert Storr, 316. According to
Romy Golan, Buchloh was “put on the American map as the great bard of institutional critique” by his
essay in the catalogue for “Europe in the Seventies” at the Chicago Art Institute in 1977. Romy Golan,
“Review of Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June
2006): 381-82. See B. H. D. Buchloh, “Formalism and Historicity—Changing Concepts in American
and European Art Since 1945,” trans. Barbara C. Flynn, in Europe in the Seventies: Aspects of Recent
Art, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1977), 83-112.
250
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History,” Ph.D. diss. (City
University of New York, 1994). In the Acknowledgments to his volume of collected essays, Buchloh
said the following about his relationship with Gerhard Richter: “Of equal importance, and fortunately
still continuing, is my friendship with Gerhard Richter. Since the early 1970s, he has taught me the
opposite half of the dialectical engagement, the one that posits at all times a commitment to the most
differentiated specificity of practice and perception (not just in painting) against any theoretical or
political doctrine. If I have included only the first of my numerous essays on his oeuvre in this
110
Dresden (2000) [fig. II-2], depicts the artist and Buchloh in front of a church door in
Dresden. 251
Buchloh’s writings on art have been published often in the journal October,
and he has been a colleague of Rosalind Krauss in connection with that publication,
as a graduate student advisee, and as a professor of art history. Buchloh’s overtly
Marxist approach to art produced a vituperative attack on postwar West German
figurative painting in his 1981 essay, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,”
in which he stridently criticized German painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Georg
Baselitz for their regressive art practices. 252 Buchloh’s derision of painting was
complemented the next year in an essay in which he valorized montage and
appropriation as allegorical art-producing strategies, relying heavily on the theories of
Walter Benjamin. 253 In the second essay, he praised contemporary artists such as
Sherrie Levine, Michael Asher and Dara Birnbaum for using methods such as
confiscation, superimposition and fragmentation (the kinds of tactics valorized by
Douglas Crimp), based on theories developed in the early twentieth century by Sergei
volume, it is because my monographic study of Richter’s work will follow the publication of these
essays in the not too distant future.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and
American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000), xiii.
251
Karen Rosenberg, “The Real Richter?” Art Monthly no. 255 (April 2002): 2. This painting was
included in an exhibition titled “What Is Painting: Contemporary Art from the Collection” at the
Museum of Modern Art during the summer of 2007. Given Buchloh’s general derision of painting, yet
his acclamation of Richter, there is a certain irony in curator Anne Umland’s selection of this work to
represent Richter in an exhibition that questioned the nature of painting.
148 In “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” focusing particularly on German
Neoexpressionism and Italian “Arte Ciphra,” Buchloh saw such painting as regressive contrivances of
aura and fetishized modes of artistic production: “Concomitant with the fetishization of painting in the
cult of peinture is a fetishization of the perceptual experience of the work as auratic. The contrivance
of aura is crucial for these works in order that they fulfill their function as the luxury products of a
fictitious high culture.” Ibid., 59.
253
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary
Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 43-56.
111
Eisenstein, Berthold Brecht, Walter Benjamin and others. At the same time, he again
criticized contemporary painting:
We can find strategies and procedures of quotation and appropriation
in contemporary painting, but the very mode of painting provides an
experience of reconciliation….Even the “conspicuous” delegation of
certain painterly tasks of figurative representation to anonymous
commercial experts or professionals, who draw bunnies or bombers,
does not resolve the historical limitations of this production procedure
and its incapacity to develop an adequate viewer-text relationship. 254
Those two essays, written at the critical moment of the heralded return of
painting to Western Europe and the United States, were instrumental in elucidating
Buchloh’s fundamental approach to postwar art. Buchloh’s antipathy toward West
German figurative painting in particular would seem to make him a most unlikely
champion of Gerhard Richter. For purposes of this study, Buchloh’s writings on
Richter will be considered from the standpoint of his commentary on Richter’s
combination of mediums within the practice of painting, which Buchloh has been
able to defend because of what he sees as dialectical oppositions that facilitate its
inclusion within his Marxist perspective. Somehow, he has had to be convinced that
Richter’s painting does not produce “an experience of reconciliation,” and that it
resolves “the historical limitations of this production procedure.” As will be seen, the
process of Richter’s praxis is as important to Buchloh as is the product, and the issues
of the dialectic and negation within individual works and between types of works are
paramount.
Buchloh’s first published article about Richter’s painting was written in 1976,
just before Richter’s abstract paintings appeared and five years prior to Buchloh’s
254
Ibid., 52. “Bunnies and bombers” may be references to the paintings of Sigmar Polke and Anselm
Kiefer, respectively. Richter, too, painted images of World War II-era bombers.
112
wholesale castigation of figurative painting. 255 In that essay, Buchloh traced
Richter’s historical trajectory from his training in Socialist Realism, to his exposure
to Duchamp, Pop Art, Minimalism and Robert Rauschenberg, and concluded that
Richter’s photopainting was a unity of three dialectically contradictory links: the
readymade, the iconography of photography, and the practice of painting. 256 Calling
Richter “a dialectitian” [sic.], Buchloh saw Richter’s paintings as “acting against the
reifying function of the copy and of the reproduction,” and as “discourses filled with
reality (devoid of any subjective expression).” Buchloh found structural oppositions
within Richter’s oeuvre. For example, within early 1960s photopaintings of banal
subjects such as rolls of toilet paper and groups of tourists, Richter used amateur or
reportage photographs as readymades along with the traditional materials of painting
to produce painted photographs. This combination presented “a perceptual illusion”
and a “misleading” impetus to see the works as conventional paintings, yet with an
authenticity that photographs confer because of their indexical, or empirical, nature.
Using such photographs as a “dictionary of culture,” Richter was “studying the
collective conditions of perception, and endeavoring to demonstrate the indissoluble
link between culturally conditioned elements and the natural process of
perception.” 257 Buchloh also found dialectical relationships within Richter’s 48
255
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Readymade, Photography, and Painting in the Painting of Gerhard
Richter,” in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat., ed. Daniel Abadie (Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne,
1977), 11-58; republished and expanded in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, 365-403. Buchloh
established his interest in Richter’s work in this first essay, which was the only one in which he dealt
with the work of the 1960s. Later catalogue essays were written in connection with exhibitions of
abstract paintings, primarily, with some commentary on the portraits and still lifes. A notable
exception was Buchloh’s essay on Richter’s 15-painting cycle concerning the Baader-Meinhof group,
October 18, 1977 (1988), which are history paintings of recent events: “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s
October 18, 1977,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 89-109.
256
Buchloh, “Readymade, Photography, and Painting,” 375.
257
Ibid., 378.
113
Portraits, paintings of German historical personages made for the West German
pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale. This serial work lent itself to a minimalist
presentation (a single line of 48 nearly identical objects), and reflected a random
selection procedure based solely on the “paintability” of the original photojournalistic
pictures of iconic historic figures, although certain professions were intentionally
avoided.
There was for Buchloh a “double negation” in the painting groups that
followed: the Color Charts (1971-1973) and the Gray Pictures (1972-1975). Each
eschewed a photographic source, and thereby avoided the issues of a relationship to a
referent and of representation and expression. Together, they served to negate “the
historically defined, representational value of color,” and, moreover, the Gray
Pictures removed “the historically determined qualities of pictorial practice as
gestural activity,” thus “conferring on them a linguistic objectivity of pictorial
form.” 258
It can be seen from the foregoing that Buchloh’s fundamental focus was the
negation or absence of the traditional aspects of painting, such as representation and
reflections of the painter’s subjectivity and hand by finding dialectical or oppositional
relationships within works. He evinces no interest in aesthetics.
Buchloh’s most strained arguments arise in addressing Richter’s colorful
Abstract Paintings, which first appeared in 1976 and have the most obvious aesthetic
appeal within his oeuvre. Beginning in 1985, Buchloh was careful to negate any idea
258
Ibid., 393, 395.
114
that those works constitute “third generation Abstract Expressionism.” 259 Calling
these colorful and gestural works a “dialectical negation” of the implications of the
earlier Gray Paintings, and distinguishing between the mechanical and the organic
aspects of modernist painterly procedure, Buchloh found that Richter’s mechanical
process of producing the Abstract Paintings was their salvation. “Color sketches,” as
Richter called them, were transferred, enlarged and reproduced on canvas to create
the larger oil paintings under scrutiny. For Buchloh, this process of “structural
transformation” kept the works in the mechanical category:
The “Abstract Paintings” therefore provide us with immediate insight
into the contemporary conditions of painting: to exist between the
irreconcilable demands of the spectacle and the synecdoche and it is
this dialectic that determines the reading of the “Abstract
Paintings.” 260
Thus, although the Abstract Paintings might appear to the uninitiated viewer to be
the inheritors of both the process and the aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism, it was
the fact that the process of their making involved the mediation of a partly mechanical
photographic transformation of smaller oil sketches that kept them from being the
immediate expression of the artist’s inner thoughts and feelings, his subjectivity. But
as will be seen in interviews between Buchloh and Richter, the two often did not
speak the same language, and Richter did not speak of the Abstract Paintings in
Buchloh’s terms:
“Polychrome and complicated” were the terms that Richter used to
identify the qualities of the paintings with which he wanted to be
engaged, yet he did not mention that they would be mediated through
changes of scale and photographic technology, that their “facture”
would be shifted from the immediate to the constructed, that the
259
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Richter’s Facture: Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle,” in
Gerhard Richter, exh. cat. (New York: Marian Goodman and Sperone Westwater, 1985), np.
260
Ibid.
115
catalogue of pictorial devices—the memory of painting—would
assume suddenly the dimension of a manifestation of the conditions of
spectacle within the practices of painting itself, that it would betray the
heretofore unknown degree to which the pursuit of the modernist high
art of painting had already assumed its historical share to exist in the
culture of the spectacle itself, as the one practice that remained outside
of the totality it had become its most precious domain. 261
I would argue that Richter’s description, “polychrome and complicated,” does
not suggest that his procedure was the most important aspect of the work for him, or
that he had in mind Buchloh’s goal of “resistance and opposition against the totality
of myth in the mass cultural forms of representation that governed everyday life: the
spectacle of consumption and the consumption of spectacle.” Mis-identifying these
works as the result of a practice of synecdoche and in a dialectical relationship with
Richter’s immediately prior practice of painting in monochrome allowed Buchloh to
define them in terms of radical resistance.
Writing in 1992 in connection with Richter’s installation of paintings and
glass panes in a “simulacral cabinet” at Documenta IX, Buchloh continued to connect
Richter with his arguments against spectacle culture in general, and art installations in
particular. Although he regarded typical installation art as complicit with the “scopic
regime of commodity culture where every utilitarian object has to be transformed into
a visual display,” Richter’s installation, in Buchloh’s view, was a demonstration of
the contradictions inherent in artistic practice: “This condition is undoubtedly one of
the most paradoxical challenges artistic practices currently confront: to have to
construct objects of visuality that resist the continuous process of the transformation
261
Ibid.
116
of experience into specularity.” 262 In this case, Richter’s placement of abstract
paintings in a wood-paneled simulated railroad car,
foreground[ed] the actual conditions of temporality and ephemerality
that currently determine the status of the work of art: to be shipped
from one exhibition to another. This was one form of opposition to the
culturally-defined position of painting, while it performed a second:
the allegorical enactment of “the failure and decorative misuse of
abstraction.” 263
Buchloh noted that German critics of the installation were unable to
understand Richter’s “painterly intervention in the territory of current installation
art,” 264 and he offered no evidence that Richter’s personal intentions were consistent
with the writer’s interpretation. He could suggest only that El Lissitzky’s Abstract
Cabinet (1926-28) for Dresden and Hannover, and Marcel Broodthaers’ La Salle
Blanche (1975) in Paris were “present in Richter’s art-historical unconscious.” 265
Buchloh admitted that Richter did not share the “radical pessimism” of Broodthaers,
but asserted that he mourned “the destruction of those forms of knowledge and
experience once provided by painting for its spectators.” He also failed to
acknowledge Lissitzky’s utopian leanings when comparing the works of Richter and
Lissitzky.
Even in the small floral still life (the only work in the exhibition based on a
photograph and representing a genre that had descended to a “profound level of
painterly decrepitude”), Buchloh found aspects of opposition. First, in the source
photograph and in the painting, the flowers are viewed from below, depriving viewers
262
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Allegories of Painting,” in Gerhard Richter: Documenta IX, 1992,
exh. cat. (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1993), 9.
263
Ibid., 10, 11.
264
Ibid., 9.
265
Ibid., 13.
117
of the traditional “gasp or a gaze of control and possession.” Second, “the degree of
obsolescence inherent in the category of the floral still life…allows Richter to spark a
moment of resistant experience without that moment being instantly adapted to the
terms of the spectacular.” The choice of the obsolete genre “might originate in an
inverted gesture of opposition to the universal spectacularization to which all avantgarde models are now incessantly subjected.” 266
Richter simply does not speak in Buchloh’s terms. In an often-cited interview
that Buchloh conducted with Richter in 1986, 267 they spoke at cross purposes
throughout as Buchloh attempted to obtain Richter’s agreement about dialectical
aspects of his works and their potentially socially critical nature. It is difficult to tell
whether Richter is amused or aggravated by Buchloh’s attempts to characterize his
work. For example:
B: So you would dispute the charge that has so often been
made against you, that you have cynically acquiesced to the
ineffectuality of painting?
R: Yes. Because I know for a fact that painting is not
ineffectual. I would only like it to accomplish more.
B: In other words, you are making the spectacle of painting
visible in its rhetoric, without practicing it.
R: What sense would that have? That would be the last thing
I’d want.
B: Why is it inconceivable for you to consider or to discuss in
social and political terms the idea of an existence free from
domination? Why is your only recourse that to the metaphor of nature,
like a Romantic?
266
Ibid., 13.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Interview with Gerhard Richter,” trans. Stephen P. Duffy, in Terry A.
Neff, ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 15-29.
267
118
R: No, like a painter. The reason I don’t argue in “sociopolitical terms” is that I want to produce a picture and not an ideology.
It’s always its factuality, and not its ideology, that makes a picture
good. 268
Commentary on Benjamin Buchloh
Criticism of Buchloh’s writings on art of the late twentieth century in general,
and his assessment of Richter’s work in particular, has not been extensive. Robert
Storr has been gentle, but clear, in his criticism of Buchloh. In a 2001 interview
about the Museum of Modern Art’s forthcoming Richter retrospective, Storr said,
“Buchloh’s understanding of conventions is that they are inherently evil and that they
need to be exposed….Buchloh [in his 1986 interview with Richter] raises many,
many good topics, but he assigns Richter only one role in relation to each of them.” 269
In his Introduction to the retrospective catalogue, Storr noted the irony of
condemnation as a compliment in Buchloh’s back-handed praise of the painter: “At
the moment, this makes you particularly attractive to many viewers because your
work looks like a survey of the whole universe of twentieth-century painting,
presented in one vast, cynical retrospective.” According to Storr, Buchloh and other
“doctrinal exponents of Marcel Duchamp’s conceit that ‘retinal,’ or perceptual, forms
of art had been permanently eclipsed by conceptual ones cast Richter as the man who
could thoroughly undo painting precisely because he could do it so well.” 270 Storr
268
Ibid., 21, 28, 29.
Robert Storr, “Call to Order: Gerhard Richter at MoMA: Tom Holert talks with Robert Storr,”
Artforum 40, no. 5 (January 2002): 105.
270
Storr, Gerhard Richter, 17. Storr stated, also, that by “those dedicated to the proposition that
painting was a social and aesthetic anachronism [including Douglas Crimp], Richter the postmodern
polymath was accorded a special—and especially—problematic role as the unrivaled anti-master of his
craft who could demonstrate once and for all that painting had exhausted its formerly protean
possibilities—possibilities which could never be revived no matter how skillfully they were evoked.”
Ibid.
269
119
concluded his Introduction with the thought that since painting is no longer such a
dominant medium, it was time to see Richter’s work “at one remove from these
increasingly dated and preemptive ways of looking….Whatever has been or may be
said about his contribution to the medium…Richter has, paradoxically or stealthily,
demonstrated painting’s resiliency.” 271
In an essay on German figurative painting from 1960 to 1988, Thomas Krens
presented a concise and uncritical overview of Buchloh’s criticism of painting as
expressed in “Figures of Authority,” calling him a “principal contestant in the
international critical debate…based on the strength of a penetrating Marxist
critique.” 272 According to Krens, Buchloh’s critique is based on “an insightful, if
selective, Marxist reading of history that is systematically organized to attack the
obvious and superficial characteristics demonstrated by an oeuvre that threatened the
adversarial stance that a radical art had traditionally maintained against the cultural
271
Ibid., 18. See, also, Robert Storr’s characterization of the ideological position of the authors in his
review of Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, of whom Buchloh is one:
Speaking of “the method of those who seek intellectual hegemony,” Storr said, “On that score, one
wonders how it is that the October ‘revolutionaries’ of 1976 have become figures of authority so well
entrenched within their positions, or why their carefully hedged, dogma-heavy version of twentiethcentury art serves the needs of so many sectors of institutional American culture at its most
conservative moment since the 1950s.” Storr, “Review of Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism,
Postmodernism,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June 2006): 382-85.
272
Thomas Krens, “German Painting: Paradox and Paradigm in Late Twentieth-Century Art,” in
Refigured Painting: The German Image 1960-88, ed. Thomas Krens, Michael Govan, and Joseph
Thompson (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Munich: Prestel, 1989), 15. According
to Krens, the other “principal contestant” was Donald Kuspit. See Donald Kuspit, “Flak from the
‘Radicals’: The American Case Against Current German Painting,” in Cowart, ed., Expressions: New
Art from Germany, 43-44, in which Kuspit attacked critics of German Neoexpression, particularly
Buchloh. For example, “Buchloh never considers the possibility that Modernism might have become
an empty stereotype of itself, and that its strategies of ‘parody and appropriation’ might have been
overused and abused to the point of becoming mechanical reflexes.” Speaking also of Douglas Crimp,
Thomas Lawson and others, Kuspit said, “They have an unwittingly ahistorical and thus subtly
irrelevant conception of avant-garde radicality. They refuse to see themselves as traditionalists loyal to
an old cause of Modernism, for then they would have to see themselves, rather than the Germans, as
decadent.”
120
status quo.” 273 Krens suggested that Buchloh’s derision of the new German painting
was based on three points: (i) that the modernist paradigm has suffered periods of
exhaustion, and at such times there has been “a call for a return to traditional values
of craft and representation,” so that the newness of this art, quoting Buchloh,
“consists precisely in [its] current historical availability, not in any actual innovation
of artistic practice;” (ii) the aesthetic appreciation for this art relies on “an obsolete
critical language of ‘false naivete and bloated trivialities’;” and (iii) this art is a
derivative attempt to revive figuration and representation, and is therefore, again
quoting Buchloh, “a confirmation of the hieratics of ideological domination.” 274 In
the final assessment, for Buchloh, the return to figurative painting was politically
dangerous. Krens’s objective was not to refute Buchloh’s view, but to place it the
context of alternative readings furnished by German art historians who agreed that
opposition in art production was essential, but believed that using so-called bourgeois
conventions could be a “radical mechanism for exposing a mentality of
repression.” 275
The most direct attack against Buchloh’s attack on painting was voiced by
Michael Peglau, who focused on both “Figures of Authority” and “Allegorical
Procedures.” 276 Peglau’s critique is based on what he termed Buchloh’s eclectic
reliance on several Marxist writers who held somewhat inconsistent views, and,
particularly, on his authoritarian rhetoric and his failure to define terms and back up
273
Krens, Ibid.
Ibid., 15-16.
275
Ibid.,16.
276
Michael Peglau, “Against Benjamin Buchloh’s Attack on Painting,” Art Criticism 3, no. 2 (1987):
1-33. For another critical view, see Rainer Rochlitz, “Where We Have Got To,” in Photography and
Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas (Barcelona: Consorci del Museu d’Art
Contemporani del Barcelona, 2000), 103-25.
274
121
his arguments. He called Buchloh “the most convinced and vehement of Marxist
critics writing in English” and one who hates the “auratic status” of “high art.” 277
Ultimately, Peglau asserted that “Figures of Authority” “reads finally as an exercise
in nostalgia, as a eulogy to dead and explorative figures such as Benjamin…and also
to some of the art in the radicality of its original moment.” 278
Peglau’s criticism of Buchloh’s “vehement” castigation of the painting that
had come to the fore in the late 1970s and was featured in the 1980 Venice Biennale,
where the work of painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz was shown in
the West German pavilion makes a number of valid points. 279 The language and tone
of “Figures of Authority” is strident and unconvincing and lacks arguments as to why
practices such as collage and montage developed in the early twentieth century should
be the standard for art produced 60 years later. Buchloh is wedded to a dialectical
process that includes unending opposition to the status quo. For Buchloh, all art is
politically potent, and if it is auratic or aesthetic, it is a bourgeois commodity that
supports a repressive social order by participating in the spectacle of the culture
industry. He does acknowledge that the utopian aspects of earlier avant-garde art
theories that held that art could lead to changes in the social order are no longer
viable. Thus, at this stage of history, what advanced art must resist is the cultural
spectacle of late capitalism, utilizing “critical interventions” and “other structures
generating the dissolution of power and repression.” 280
277
Ibid., 1,4.
Ibid., 26.
279
Thomas Krens outlined the spate of international exhibitions of German figurative painting from
1979 to 1984, when “the meteoric rise of German figurative painting to international prominence was
established as an indisputable if nevertheless controversial fact.” Krens, 14-15.
280
Buchloh, Introduction to Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, xxiii-xxv.
278
122
In an argument in defense of what she calls critical figuration, Suzaan
Boettger criticized Buchloh’s false dichotomy “between representational form (seen
as a retreat to tradition) and modernist abstraction (with its corollary avant-garde,
constantly and radically innovative)” expressed in “Figures of Authority.” 281 She
asserted that some regression can be productive, attributing Buchloh’s failure to
accept this possibility to his reliance on a Lacanian, linguistic conception of reality
and a Freudian view of regression as pathological. Ultimately, Boettger asserted a
vague and unconvincing psychological explanation for the “way neo-expressionism
[had] dominated the field in the last decade,” suspecting that such images fulfilled an
undefined “substantial need.” 282
Overall, Buchloh has misconstrued Gerhard Richter’s project by finding
within his praxis and products oppositional and critical qualities that Richter either
denies or sees as less important. Buchloh cannot completely accept the fact that
Richter is an unapologetic, consummate painter. Buchloh’s acclamation of Richter’s
painting remains a puzzling and strained aberration within his considerable critical
writings. 283
281
Suzaan Boettger, “Regression in the Service of…,” Art Criticism 2, no. 2 (1986): 57-68.
Ibid., 67.
283
His most direct statement on this point was made in the Introduction to Neo-Avantgarde and
Culture Industry, in which he said, with regard to his recent work on Gerhard Richter, “I have focused
on the aesthetic capacity to construct the mnemonic experience as one of the few acts of resistance
against the totality of spectacularization.” (p. xxv.) With one minor exception, Buchloh has not written
directly about Jeff Wall. His attack on Thierry de Duve at the Montreal symposium cited above,
however, was an indirect criticism of Wall, whose work The Storyteller was the subject of de Duve’s
presentation and who does not acknowledge a break in the history of Modernism. Buchloh was quoted
as saying that de Duve’s approach was enough to merit “howls of laughter.” Ord, 62. In addition, in
Buchloh’s Introduction to Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, referring to “a certain light-box
photo-conceptualism,” he said: “This type of installation art and photo-conceptualism now produces a
techno-lingo of the image that can pride itself in being the first to have fully absorbed the very
technologies that made the culture of spectacle and the production of advertisement imagery a
monolithic global power. Such affirmative mimesis makes it seem inescapable that artistic practices
would, if not actually pave the way for, at least finally succumb to the powers of spectacle culture to
282
123
Peter Osborne has also managed to find a way around the fact that Richter is a
painter. Speaking in Buchloh’s terms, Osborne has argued that Richter’s
photopainting is a “double negation:” the enactment of a painterly negation of the
historical negation of painting by the invention of the photograph. 284 Richter has
said, “I don’t copy photographs laboriously with painstaking craftsmanship: I work
out a rational technique—which is rational because I paint like a camera, and which
looks the way it does because I exploit the altered way of seeing created by
photography.” 285 (Emphasis added.) By using the photograph as the source and
subject matter of his paintings, according to Osborne, Richter
uses the objectivity or givenness of the photographic image…to
counter the perceived subjectivism of painting at two distinct levels:
extrinsically, by taking away the responsibility for the representational
content from the painting and displacing it onto the photography, and
intrinsically, by thereby predetermining the compositional form of the
picture and reducing its representational task to that of the apparent
replication or simple reproduction of the mechanically produced
permeate all conventions of perception and communication without any form of resistance whatsoever.
It implies that even the mere thought and the slightest gesture of opposition appear dwarfed and
ludicrous in the face of the totalitarian control and domination by spectacle.” Ibid., xxi-xxii. It is
inconceivable that this does not refer to Jeff Wall, who initiated and popularized the lightbox format,
and who has taken the position that gestures produce critical meanings within his pictures. This use of
gesture is explored in Chapter Three. In a later postscript to “A Draft for Dan Graham’s
Kammerspiel,” cited above, although critical of Buchloh, Wall states, “It will be clear in the text that
my critique of Buchloh’s writing was developed in an atmosphere of respect and admiration for his
work. It was conceived as a contribution to a dialectic in which Buchloh had set exemplary
standards.” Yet, Wall is clear that he regards Buchloh’s position as unproductive and defeatist: “This
strategic self-dissolution of the aesthetic as a conscious antagonistic response to the ‘decreed abolition’
of critical negation by the culture industry is the central term of Buchloh’s thesis, and it is the essence
of what he wishes to preserve from conceptualism. The act of the self-dissolution of the aesthetic, still
instinctive in conceptualism, becomes conscious and deliberate in Buchloh….But this supremely
conscious act of negation is of course not original to Buchloh; it is Adorno’s. For all its trappings of
the productivist ‘redesigning of reality,’ this act is centered on the gesture of consciously willed
abnegation, self-cancellation, and defeatism which Adorno concluded was the essential condition of art
in a situation of advancing barbarism.” Ibid., 25. Here, in 1981, Wall established his claim to the
validity of making art with aesthetic qualities that is at the same time socially critical, while providing
a complex history and argument for the failure of Conceptual Art.
284
Peter Osborne, “Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 102-13.
The notion of double negation sounds similar to Jeff Wall’s arguments about “transgressing
transgression” in his pictorial praxis. Wall’s position opposing the need for physical rupture in a work
of art is explored in Chapter Three.
285
Richter, “Notes, 1964-1965,” in DPP, 35.
124
image, in painterly mimicry of the aspiration to objectivity of the
naturalistic representational function itself, usurped by photography
from an older tradition in painting. 286
On this point, Richter has said, “In 1962, I found my first escape hatch: by painting
from photographs, I was relieved of the need to choose or construct a subject. I had
to choose the photographs, of course; but I could do that in a way that avoided any
commitment to the subject, by using motifs which had very little image to them and
which were anachronistic.” 287 Yet, although Richter has acknowledged that deciding
what to paint had been a problem for him even in his youth, another way to look at
the act of painting from found photographs is that it necessarily entails choice. He
has said,
I am continually composing and above all deleting (i.e., avoiding), and
I restrict myself to a very small repertoire, which is to say that I act
very deliberately….But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in
mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph
barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I
photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this
I conclude that I know what I want. 288
Given the thousands of photographs included in Richter’s Atlas, the process of
selection (and avoidance) is of critical importance.
As for the “the apparent replication or simple reproduction of the
mechanically produced image” posited by Osborne, there is overwhelming evidence
of alteration and manipulation of the original photographs to produce significantly
different impressions between the paintings and the photographs—they are simply
different pictures. Richter recodes the source photographs in numerous ways. First,
he typically leaves out many details, so that there is a high degree of abstraction.
286
Osborne, 104-05.
Richter “Notes,” in DPP, 130.
288
Ibid.
287
125
Second, of course, they are paintings, and the tactility of the brush and oil paint on
canvas is very visible: one is looking at an entirely different object. The blurring
technique that the artist employs, although it serves, ironically, to bring forth into the
paintings the credibility of the photograph, even though “faulty,” creates a distance
that an out-of-focus photograph also necessarily creates. This technique keeps the
viewer from an immediate and easy apprehension of the subject. Yet, these are only
the most obvious differences. The nuances occur in both the choices of images and
the revisions made in the paintings. Since Atlas makes many of the source
photographs available, comparisons may often be made. 289
In light of the differences between Richter’s source photographs and his
paintings, Peter Osborne’s idea about Richter’s “painterly mimicry of the aspiration
to objectivity of the naturalistic representational function itself, usurped by
photography” is simplistic. There is no question that Richter is interested in
photography as a model for painting and a source of subjects. Richter is engaged,
however, in far more than the “double negation” focused on painting as an obsolete
technique that Osborne presents in order to place Richter comfortably within
postmodernist practice. Even with the doubled distance between the painting and the
object of which the photograph is a trace, the effects of the trace are in the painting,
but vastly complicated by the recoding that Richter performs by erasing details,
emphasizing parts and rearranging objects. The product is a painting that has
embedded within it a photograph that has been altered to produce another picture. Its
superficial appearance as a fuzzy, distorted or discolored photograph adds, oddly, to
289
The most direct opportunity for this kind of comparison is with October 18, 1977. See Robert
Storr, “The Paintings,” in Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2000), 95-117.
126
its credibility as a picture, but the apprehension of the original photograph and the
apprehension of the painting are entirely different experiences. As Richter has said,
Life communicates itself to us through convention and through the
parlour games and laws of social life. Photographs are ephemeral
images of this communication—as are the pictures that I paint from
photographs. Being painted, they no longer tell of a specific situation,
and the representation becomes absurd. As a painting, it changes both
its meaning and its information content. (Emphasis added.) 290
Is There a Pure Medium?
From the vantage point of more than 25 years since 1980, the pivotal year of
the period of this study, concern about medium per se seems to have diminished, if
not evaporated. Photography has become such an integral part of so many art
practices, that its physical properties as a “technical support” are not labored over. 291
Emerging from the controversies of the early 1980s, some recent art surveys
demonstrate the status of photographic art.
In a 2003 survey of art utilizing photography during the previous three
decades, David Campany asserted that “In what might now have become a postmedium condition for art, photography is so often the medium of choice”292
Appropriating the title of Aaron Scharf’s 1968 book on the history of the relationship
between photography and art, Art and Photography, Campany extended the
290
Richter, “Notes, 1964-1965,” DPP, 31.
See, for example, Andy Grundberg and Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, Photography and Art:
Interactions Since 1946 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987). Earlier studies of the historic
relationships between photography and art include Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London:
Penguin Books, 1986), previously published in 1968; Van Deren Coke, The Painter and the
Photograph: From Delacroix to Warhol (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974); and
Volker Kahmen, Art History of Photography, trans. Brian Tubb (New York: Viking Press, 1974). A
more recent discussion is Mark Prince, “Painting & Photography,” Art Monthly 260 (October 2002):
2: “Whereas the boundaries between the media were relatively rigid for Gerhard Richter or Chuck
Close—and transgressing them was a significant move in itself--painting and photography now exist at
either end of a non-hierarchical axis on which the poles can variously merge and overlap, seeking
contrasting qualities.”
292
David Campany, ed. Art and Photography (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), 15.
291
127
discussion with images and documents from the period, including works by both Wall
and Richter. 293 Campany noted that given the recent acceleration and largely
electronic media culture, “photography is now grasped as a medium characterized by
slowness. Where once it might have been the pinnacle of cultural speed, it now
seems a more deeply contemplative medium, detached even while it describes.” This
slowness, coupled with “the move toward very large prints that hold the attention of
the gallery viewer in a very different way to the precious and small formats of the
past…has allowed photography to assume the scale and modes of attention formerly
ascribed to painting.” 294
In a 2001 exhibition entitled “Painting at the Edge of the World,” curator
Douglas Fogle included two digitalized photographs by Andreas Gursky among
works that were otherwise paintings. 295 The Gursky photographs were Untitled X
(Constable) (1999), a C-print showing a detail of a painting by John Constable; and
Untitled VI (1997), a C-print showing the entire image of Jackson Pollock’s One:
Number 31, 1950 (Autumn Rhythm) as exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. As
discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Gursky has engaged with painting within
his photographic oeuvre, although I would argue that Peter Galassi’s comparison of
certain works to those of Gerhard Richter is overdrawn. To include Gursky’s
293
Campany also included one of Thomas Struth’s museum photographs, mentioned earlier. Ibid.,
159.
294
Ibid., 20, 40.
295
Douglas Fogle, Painting at the Edge of the World, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center,
2001). In his essay, “The Trouble with Painting,” 13-25, Fogle acknowledged the controversies
regarding painting , including the suspicion that was mounted during the 1960s and the refusals to
paint exemplified by the work of Daniel Buren. In a nod to the ideological and ontological issues in
this history, he included works by Helio Oiticica, Paul Thek and Marcel Broodthaers in the exhibition.
Broodthaers’s work was Tableau Bateau (1973), an 80-slide installation that showed small fragments
of a historic seascape painting, thus invoking connections between painting and photography while
deconstructing the notion of the tableau. This work is the source of the title of Rosalind Krauss’s long
essay, A Voyage on the North Sea, discussed above.
128
photography in a painting exhibition, however, is to equate it with painting in a way
that takes the argument a step further. Acknowledging the inspiration of a review of
Gursky’s work, Fogle quoted a critic as justification for including the photographs in
the exhibition:
“Painting” is a philosophical enterprise that doesn’t always involve
paint…It is “a way of organizing the world that represents neither truth
nor fiction exclusively but rather a little of both. Whether an artist
uses a brush or a camera to achieve that goal scarcely matters. 296
In the entry on Gursky, Fogle offered the idea that Gursky’s “large-scale, saturated
photographs inhabit a space between painting and photography….The resolute
flatness of his compositions references the geometric forms of minimalist art and the
all-over quality of Jackson Pollock’s paintings.” Simply put, these photographs of
paintings apparently look like paintings.
Another 2001 exhibition, “As Painting: Division and Displacement” carried
the expansion of the field of painting far beyond its traditional boundaries by
including photography, sculpture, architecture and installation. 297 In a philosophical
discussion incorporating the ideas of writers such as Kant, Hegel, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Greenberg and Fried, Stephen Melville attempted to define
what “counts as painting” since the 1960s, when, he says, Minimalism placed
painting into question. Melville based his conclusions on which works of art offer an
experience of what we know is continuous with painting:
It will be enough that a work shows itself as painting—that it be able
to, as Fried puts it, “stand comparison with the painting of the past
whose quality is not in doubt,” or, as I would put it, that it offer an
296
Fogle, quoting Howard Halle’s review of an exhibition of Gursky’s photography, “Photounrealism,” Time Out New York (December 30, 1999-January 6, 2000): 55-56.
297
Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville, As Painting: Division and Displacement,
exh. cat. (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 2001).
129
experience that we recognize as continuous with what we know to be
the experience of painting—for it to be a painting. 298
The exhibition included works by Mel Bochner, Sherrie Levine, James
Welling and Donald Judd, among works by many French artists whose work since the
1960s the curators felt had been overlooked. The philosophical reach of the
exhibition can be illustrated by the inclusion of five works by Gerhard Richter:
Shadowpicture I (1968), a calotype; Doppelglasscheibe (416) (1977), two large
mirrors mounted on a metal stand facing in opposite directions; I. G. (790-4) (1993)
and I. G.(790-5) (1993), each, a photopainting of the upper torso of a young man who
faces a blank wall; and Abstraktes Bild (825-10) (1995), a colorful Abstract Painting.
The variety in Richter’s oeuvre fairly demonstrates the “division and displacement”
inherent in the conception of the exhibition overall. With regard to Richter’s works,
Melville said, “painting clearly has no one place in which it finds its essential form
but is permanently given over to a dispersion across a number of ‘genres.’” 299 He
asserted further that “painting evidently does not happen for Richter apart from an
engagement also with other practices, most obviously photography but also
sculpture.” 300
In the exhibition “As Painting,” the notion of medium was opened to the point
of erasure, as confirmed by the tortured explanation of the difficult process of
choosing artists and works to include. Ultimately, Melville said, “It is the exhibition
298
Stephen Melville, “Counting/As/Painting,” in As Painting, 1-26.
Ibid., 142.
300
Ibid.
299
130
that sets a certain limit to theory,” 301 meaning, it would appear, that each included
work was “as painting” to someone.
Conclusion
This Chapter began with Robert Rauschenberg’s question, “What’s a pure
medium?” That was a very important question in 1961, and, as has been
demonstrated, it became vastly more important as Conceptual Art gave way to the
emergence of large-scale color photography and the re-emergence of painting around
1980. The discourse that developed, as art that appeared to be less critical of social
and political conditions in the United States and West Germany seemed to take over
the museum, gallery and the market, evidenced a degree of hysteria. The most
vociferous critics of the developments were Douglas Crimp and Benjamin Buchloh,
while Rosalind Krauss, their colleague, engaged in a less political, but protracted
excavation of the meaning and function of medium that continues to the present.
The two artists whose work is the focus of this study, Jeff Wall and Gerhard
Richter, engaged in hybrid art practices that merged the mediums of photography and
painting throughout the period under study. They produced transparencies in
lightboxes and photopaintings, respectively, which draw on influences from the
conceptual period, while remaining grounded in a dominant medium. Jeff Wall is
fundamentally a photographer, and Gerhard Richter is fundamentally a painter, yet
one could not argue that the medium of either is “pure.”
As evidenced by the works included in the three exhibitions described at the
end of this Chapter, by 2001 the notion of medium was, at least in some circles, being
elided. Yet, curators remained compelled to adduce complex arguments describing
301
Ibid., 25.
131
and justifying the mix of mediums in their exhibitions, indicating that the issue of
medium, however impure, continues to be important.
132
CHAPTER THREE
DISILLUSIONMENT: THE DISRUPTION OF SCOPIC PLEASURE
IN JEFF WALL’S PICTURES
Jeff Wall disrupts and obstructs the images he creates. For all of their
monumental scale, vibrant color, and clarity of detail--in a phrase, their participation
in spectacle culture-- Wall’s images thwart clear viewing and defy easy
understanding.
Consideration of the varied ways in which Wall has complicated the
reception and understanding of his art will elucidate some of the theoretical issues
that underlie the process of picturing since the late 1970s.
Jeff Wall’s disruptions draw upon some of the critical avant-garde art theories
developed in the early twentieth century. They emanate from use of the following
techniques: the depiction of exaggerated human gestures; the placement of figures in
borderline or transitional locations and situations; the use of oblique perspectives; the
depiction of abject subject matter; and the inclusion of visual interference with
images. Moreover, Wall’s references to particular historic paintings and tropes in the
history of modernism in some transparencies invite an additional level of
interpretation that prolongs and complicates the process of reception. Several of
these techniques may appear in the same work.
The Destroyed Room (1978) [fig. III-1] is emblematic of the ways in which
the artist has invoked the discourse of the avant-garde since the beginning of his
mature praxis. It initiated the paths that Wall would traverse through the 1980s and,
in some cases, beyond. His problematizing of the production of meaning through
pictures was conscious and intentional, as Wall’s 1979 essay “To the Spectator” that
accompanied his first solo exhibition emphatically confirms.
133
The Destroyed Room is a staged scene of destruction in the bedroom of a
young woman in which only the lithe figurine on the bureau and one black stilettoheeled shoe remain standing. The figurine stands in for the room’s absent occupant,
who might have been the perpetrator, or, perhaps, the victim who has been removed.
A mattress is upended and resting on an angle, forming a diagonal central focus that
is doubled by a huge gash running from its lower right to its upper left corner. The
rifled bureau drawers are open and overflowing with what appears to be women’s
underwear, and the objects piled in disarray on the floor are women’s clothing,
jewelry and sunglasses. The discarded objects are the debris of commodities that
promise personal beauty, but are subject to constant changes in style and planned
obsolescence. This illuminated large-format transparency is shocking: it assaults the
viewer and compels consideration of what could have happened. 302
The destroyed state of this room might also be a metaphor for the destruction
of painting. Wall has said that he “filtered” the work through Eugene Delacroix’s
Death of Sardanapalous (1827), a painted depiction of aggression and violence. 303
Thus, Wall has associated the work with the tradition of Western painting just as it
was turning from the idealization of history painting toward a preoccupation with the
late Romantic emotional turmoil or psychological disruption. This period has been
characterized by Wall as one when the “eroticized zeal of military glory which
characterized the Napoleonic period…turned back inward, back toward domestic life
302
The Destroyed Room is 159 by 234 cm.
In the catalogue for Wall’s 1979 exhibition cited above, with reference to The Destroyed Room, he
included images of The Death of Sardanapalus, as well as of Marcel Duchamp’s Given: 1. The
Waterfall/2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-66), and photograph of a shop window in Paris in which
items of costume jewelry are displayed. The references to Delacroix’s and Duchamp’s works suggest
that the missing occupant of The Destroyed Room should be considered a victim.
303
134
at the end of that epoch, at the beginning of modern, bourgeois, neurotic private
life.” 304
Yet, Wall’s work is not a painting, but a photographic transparency that
blatantly shows its own artifice. The clues are the openings for the door and window
that reveal brick walls, the wooden planks that support the wall from the outside, and
the torn wall surfaces, all of which undercut the illusion by revealing that this is a
staged set constructed for the purpose of creating a picture. The destruction of the
illusion asks the spectator to puzzle over the meaning of the work, and, potentially, to
consider its resemblance to Delacroix’s painting. Moreover, the spectator is put off
by having been drawn to a lush, colorful picture only to have found that it belies the
photograph’s traditional claim to “truth” by revealing its own falsification.
The intense colors of The Destroyed Room are characteristic of late twentiethcentury advertising, in contrast to the lush, warm colors of Delacroix’s Romantic
painting. This effect is exaggerated by the set’s bright, artificial lighting, and,
particularly, by its fluorescent backlighting. As discussed above, Wall was
influenced by the format of backlighted commercial advertisements in selecting that
support for his pictures. He inserted this first work directly into commercial
“spectacle culture” by showing it in a street-level gallery window, set into a wall built
facing the window. A passer-by might have taken it to be a commercial display or
advertisement rather than a work of art. 305
This large, colorful, lighted image is disrupted by the fact that it hangs in the
balance between the spectacle of illusion and its destruction. First, there is the shock
304
Wall, in Barents, 96.
The Destroyed Room was Wall’s first completed photographic transparency. After its second
exhibition in 1979 as described here, a lightbox was provided for the work. JWCR, 274-5.
305
135
of viewing the inherently disorienting subject matter, a “destroyed room.” This raises
questions of what happened and why, but unlike most of Wall’s images that followed
in the 1980s, this one lacks an apparent human actor. Thus, the agent of the
destruction, who would have engaged in the kinds of exaggerated gestures featured in
many later pictures, is to be imagined by the observer. The only “figure” present is
the plastic statuette that holds out its skirt to display its body to the viewer. Perhaps
this cheap mass-produced object can be comprehended as a contemporary version of
the sturdy bronze statuette—a work of art--in Walter Benjamin’s example of a family
row in his discussion of epic theater:
Suddenly a stranger comes into the room. The wife is just about to
pick up a bronze statuette and throw it at the daughter, the father is
opening the window to call a policeman. At this moment the stranger
appears at the door….That is to say, the stranger is confronted with a
certain set of conditions: troubled faces, open window, a devastated
interior. 306
Benjamin was describing the way in which an interruption in the progress of a play
can raise awareness in the audience within the concept of epic theater developed by
Bertolt Brecht. The aim is to arouse “astonishment” in the spectator at the
circumstances or conditions in which the hero of the play exists, by virtue of an
interruption that “uncovers” or makes those conditions strange. 307 In his example,
which functions as a rupture within his own narrative, Benjamin described a tableau
that cuts the flow of the drama. A tableau is a circumscribed still picture, like a
306
Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre? [Second Version]” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna
Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), 18-19.
307
Ibid., 18. “Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well
say: to make them strange [verfremden].) This uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of
conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted.”
136
photograph. The viewer of Wall’s The Destroyed Room, a tableau, is a stranger at the
door who confronts a devastated interior and a set of conditions that astonish.
The personal possessions strewn across the floor invoke not only images of
aggression and anger, states of mind that the imagined gestures would have revealed,
but, also, the notion of the abject embodied in commodity fetishes in a culture of
waste. All of the objects on the floor of the room are women’s clothing and
accessories. They are abundant and redundant: three pairs of shoes, one pair of boots,
several pairs of sunglasses (one broken), several combs, some straw baskets and
many pieces of plastic jewelry, in addition to a pile of clothing spilling from a chair.
With the exception of two gold rings at the lower right edge of the transparency, there
is nothing of intrinsic value in this detritus that exposes the perpetual attempt to be
fashionable, an effort doomed to fail in a culture that promotes gratification through
the consumption of goods that quickly become obsolete.
Ideas expressed in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin regarding the alluring
phantasmagoria of commodities in the Paris arcades and world exhibitions of the
nineteenth century, by the 1960s had evolved into criticism of late-twentieth-century
capitalism. 308 Technology-based consumer culture has been blamed for conflating
art and culture and for lulling the populace into a false consciousness and acceptance
308
Speaking of the arcades, Benjamin said, “The arcades are a center of commerce in luxury items. In
fitting them out, art enters the service of the merchant.” He quoted an Illustrated Guide to Paris:
“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors
extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises.
Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so
that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.” Benjamin, Selected Writings 3: 32. With respect to
world exhibitions, Benjamin said, “World exhibitions are places of pilgrimage to the commodity
fetish….World exhibitions glorify the value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its
use value recedes into the background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to
be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the
commodity….Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be
worshipped.” (Ibid., 36-37.)
137
of the political and economic status quo. The immediate gratification of needs that
are created and manipulated by the culture produces waste. 309 That waste flirts with
the idea of the abject and, perhaps, the informe, in The Destroyed Room and in
subsequent works by Jeff Wall.
Wall’s invocation of the concepts of interruption and the abject can be
expanded by a close examination of some later works. It will be seen that Wall has
drawn directly on the theories of Benjamin, Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Fredric
Jameson, among others, as well as on surrealist notions of the abject, in both his
writings and his art production. As discussed in Chapter Two, his reliance on such
theories has led to criticism by those art historians who continue to depend on earlier
Marxist-based theorists and think that he has not faithfully followed the precepts of
his theoretical mentors. They see his lighted images as contributions to the “society
of the spectacle.” 310
309
These ideas are expressed, for example, in Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the
Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 57: “Today’s novel feature is
the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the
oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted
another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the
denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the
established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.” (p. 57.) See, also,
Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1-54. The conflation of culture and social
reality was described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in “The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94-136;
previously published in 1947 and reissued by the authors in 1969. Continuing use of the term “culture
industry” by Benjamin Buchloh, for example, can be traced to this essay.
310
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books,
1994). The title of this book is invoked to stand for the extreme aspects of commodity culture in the
late twentieth century described by Debord, and expanded by Jean Baudrillard who has claimed that
signs of the real have been substituted for reality, so that we live in a hyperreal in which there is no
distinction between the real and the imaginary. See, for example, “The Precession of Simulacra,”
trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. and intro.
Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 253-81.
138
Gestus and Gesture: The Legacy of Brecht and Benjamin
Jeff Wall has invoked the principle of gesture in two ways that have historical
origins. First, in basing some of his 1980s transparencies on paintings of early French
modernism, he has indirectly connected his use of the descriptive and communicative
nature of gesture to the writings of Charles Baudelaire. Second, and more germane to
this study, Wall has employed Bertolt Brecht’s technique of gestus as a form of
interruption, or montage, to disrupt his images.
Baudelaire wrote of the revealing nature of gesture in mid-nineteenth century
Paris, the era in which Edouard Manet was beginning to paint images of modern life
that Wall has used as bases for several of his works. 311 Wall has referred to himself
as “a painter of modern life,” recalling Charles Baudelaire’s eponymous 1863
essay. 312 Baudelaire asserted that every age “had its own gait, glance and
gesture….Within that unity which we call a Nation, the various professions and
classes…all introduce variety, not only in manners and gesture, but even in the actual
311
Wall used paintings by Manet as starting points for Picture for Women (1979), Stereo (1980), A
Woman and Her Doctor (1980-81) and Backpack (1981-1982), which are, respectively, contemporary
reconfigurations of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Olympia, In the Conservatory and The Fifer. It is
interesting to consider Wall’s metaphorical placement of himself in the period in which Manet
established his career as an innovative modern painter, rejecting the stylistic rules of the Salon. Given
Manet’s high degree of historical consciousness, including references in his work to predecessors such
as Watteau, Raphael, Velasquez and Titian, Wall has linked his own efforts at depiction to the history
of Western painting since the Renaissance. It has been suggested that Wall’s The Storyteller (1986) is
a recapitulation of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe, although Wall has denied this, most recently in a talk
at the Museum of Modern Art on February 26, 2007. He acknowledges, of course, that he was familiar
with Manet’s painting, but claims other reasons for having placed Native Americans on the grass next
to a highway overpass, listening to one who is telling a story. It would be more instructive, I think, to
consider this work in connection with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the
Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in which Benjamin decried the loss of the craft of storytelling with the rise
of the novel in modern society, and remarked on the role of the “work seasoned gestures of the hand”
in traditional storytelling. Selected Writings, 3: 143-66, 162. Moreover, the picnic on the grass is a
trope in Western art that long predated Manet.
312
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays,
trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1-43. The essay was written in 185960, and first published in 1863. Walter Benjamin’s interest in nineteenth-century Paris included a
focus on Baudelaire. See “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 155-200.
139
form of the face.” 313 Moreover, “the gesture and the bearing of the woman of today
give to her dress a life and a special character which are not those of the woman of
the past.” 314 He considered gestures to be revealing of social class, “breed” and
profession, and made numerous references to the bodily attitudes, poses, glances and
gestures of modernity. For example, the courtesan “delicately uses two fingers to
tuck in a wide panel of silk, satin or velvet which billows around her, or points a toe
whose over-ornate shoe would be enough to betray her for what she is;” and young
women of fashionable society “tap their teeth with their fans” as they gaze at an opera
“that they are pretending to follow.” 315
Jeff Wall’s images of the 1980s do not depict members of fashionable society,
but persons on the margins by virtue of their ethnicity, gender or social class. They
are not depicted in attendance at an opera, but are shown in encounters on city streets,
walking across scrubby back lots, or working in sweatshops. They are images of
contemporary urban life in which individuals are in conflict and competition for
subsistence and safety. Yet, as posited by Baudelaire, their class, “breed,” and
profession (if any) are readily revealed by Wall’s close attention to the costume,
demeanor and gesture of the actors who play the roles he has created. Although Wall
has taken his photographs in and around Vancouver, that modern port city with its
variety of immigrant and Native American populations can stand in for almost any
contemporary city in North America or even Western Europe. Thus, his figures
appear instantly recognizable.
313
Baudelaire, 13.
Ibid.
315
Ibid., 37, 35.
314
140
Wall’s use of Brecht’s theories is intentional and direct. Brecht’s didactic
approach to theater, which he called “epic theater,” utilized techniques of interruption
to produce instructional experiences. Conflating the realms of culture and politics,
epic theater was designed to keep audiences from empathizing with the play’s
characters. Brecht believed that disrupting the course of a play with projections of
text, songs, and the interspersal of tableaux in which actors paused to display
exaggerated but recognizable gestures, could educate audiences to recognize social
conditions that they might be motivated to change—in his words, “to cast a vote.” 316
Thus, Brecht’s plays were episodic, periodically breaking the audience’s
concentration on the story and forcing it to think about what was being shown. His
ideas grew out of his reading of Marx and others’ theories of aesthetics based on the
idea that montage, or the disruption of an aesthetic experience, would engender an
“alienation effect” that would promote the viewer/audience’s use of reason instead of
emotion:
The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an
experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means
of simple empathy with the characters in a play. The production took
the subject-matter and the incidents shown and put them through a
process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all
understanding….What is “natural” must have the force of what is
startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and
effect….The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it—
That’s not the way—That’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got
to stop—The sufferings of this man appal [sic] me, because they are
unnecessary—that’s great art: nothing obvious in it—I laugh when
they weep, I weep when they laugh. 317
316
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1964). “Once the content becomes, technically speaking, an independent
component, to which text, music and setting ‘adopt attitudes’; once illusion is sacrificed to free
discussion, and once the spectator, instead of being enabled to have an experience, is forced as it were
to cast his vote; then a change has been launched which goes far beyond formal matters and begins for
the first time to affect the theatre’s social function.” (p. 39.)
317
Ibid., 71.
141
Brigid Doherty has elucidated the notion of gestus in Brecht’s plays, as
distinguished from mere gesture. Gestus is a realm that includes bodily posture, tone
of voice and facial expression, according to Brecht, and, according to Doherty, the
term indicates “the embeddedness of a particular gestic element of speech or posture
in a complex of social relations and processes.” 318
In Brecht’s epic play Mann ist Mann, 319 the protagonist Galy Gay goes out to
buy a fish for his wife, but, instead, is transformed into a warrior through the actions
of soldiers he meets and his own passivity in adopting the identity of a soldier. In the
words of another character in the play, “This evening you’ll see a man assembled like
a car, without his losing anything by it.” Further, the lesson for the audience is stated
as follows:
Herr Bertolt Brecht hopes you will see the ground on
which you stand
Melt beneath your feet like snow
And will learn from the packer Galy Gay
That it’s easy in life to go astray. 320
318
Brigid Doherty, “Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin,” MLN 115, no. 3 (April 2000): 457.
According to John Willett in a translator’s Note to Brecht’s essay “Notes on the Opera,” the term
“gestisch” is the adjective of “Gestus,” which “means both gist and gesture; an attitude or a single
aspect of an attitude, expressible in words or actions.” Brecht, 42. In an essay titled “A Short
Organum for the Theatre,” published in 1948, Brecht described “gest” as follows: “The realm of
attitudes adopted by the characters towards one another is what we call the realm of gest. Physical
attitude, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by a social gest: the characters are
cursing, flattering, instructing one another, and so on….These expressions of a gest are usually highly
complicated and contradictory, so that they cannot be rendered by any single word and the actor must
take care that in giving his image the necessary emphasis he does not lose anything, but emphasizes the
entire complex.” Brecht, 198, 205.
319
Bertolt Brecht, Mann ist Mann, in Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays: Two of 8, ed. and intro. John
Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen Drama, 1994), vii-xiv, 257-302. This play was
Brecht’s model for epic theater, according to Walter Benjamin. See “What is Epic Theatre? [First
Version],” in Understanding Brecht, 3.
320
Walter Benjamin, “Bert Brecht,” in Understanding Brecht, 369.
142
The audience will view the “reassembling” of Galy Gay by means of changes in his
costume, demeanor and gesture, and with the aid of pauses in the flow of the action
will foster the development of an attitude toward what they see.
Two examples of Wall’s use of gesture for the purpose of elucidating
contemporary socio-economic conflict are Mimic (1982) and Outburst (1989). In
Mimic (fig. III-2), the three people shown walking down a city street toward the
viewer include a Caucasian couple and an Asian man walking alone. The man of the
couple holds his companion’s hand with his left hand, while he mimics and insults the
Asian man by pulling up his own eyelid with his middle finger. The mimic’s
companion appears oblivious to this remarkably economical and insulting gesture, as,
with her eyes half closed, she appears to be dragged along toward their destination. It
is unclear whether the victim of the insult is aware of it, although he is glancing in the
direction of the couple and his left hand is slightly clenched. The dress and demeanor
of the three figures define their social status, as they appear to be members of the
working class. The Asian man might be wearing clothes for work as a delivery
person, while the couple is dressed in a more countercultural style, as the man has
long hair and a beard. The picture exposes conflicts between genders, races and
classes by showing a Caucasian male attempting to dominate a woman and a person
of color presumably by virtue of his race and gender. 321 Wall once described the
Caucasian male figure as “the abusive white lumpenproletarian.” 322
Outburst (fig. III-3) depicts another scene of tension dealing with issues of
ethnicity, gender and class. The central figure, an Asian male, gestures theatrically
321
Wall has said that he based this image on an occurrence that he observed. JWCR, 293. He
describes images that he constructs based on observations as “near-documentary.”
322
Wall, in Barents, 101.
143
with a Kung-fu-like gesture toward an Asian female working at a sewing machine in
a sweat shop. 323 Other Asian women sew nearby, and a Caucasian male, perhaps the
boss, glances up from the rear of the room. One is not certain whether the gesturing
figure has just arisen from his seat at the sewing machine in the foreground, or is
overseeing the work at the direction of the white man, who certainly does not sew.
The eruption of anger appears to have shocked and terrified the worker on the right.
The closed curtains suggest that this may be an illegal operation on which immigrants
are dependent for survival. 324 The martial arts-like pose of the central figure clues the
viewer to the fact that these are actors playing roles. Yet, as in Mimic, it is clear that
this is a demonstration of race, class and gender-oriented tensions. The gestures,
bodily attitudes and facial expressions of the figures operate to startle the viewer,
disrupt what is otherwise a large unified picture, and create ambiguity about what is
occurring. 325
Wall consciously used Bertolt Brecht’s theory of gesture to disrupt his images,
but projected a late-twentieth century gloss onto its function. Speaking of his use of
gesture, Wall said,
The ceremoniousness, the energy, and the sensuousness of the gestures
of baroque art are replaced in modernity by mechanistic movements,
323
Thomas Crow has observed that this figure’s pose, portraying the terror of factory discipline, is a
“martial-arts pose reminiscent of Asian film.” Thomas Crow, “Profane Illuminations: The Social
History of Jeff Wall,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1996), 151-69, 166.
324
The obscured or blind window is not unusual in Wall’s work, imparting a sense of being closed in
with an unknown realm beyond. See, for example, A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October
1947 (1990); Insomnia (1994); Swept (1995); and Blind Window no. 1, Blind Window no. 2 and Blind
Window no. 3 (each 2000), discussed below.
325
Other works in which theatrical gestures are prominent include No (1983), Milk (1984), The
Agreement (1987), An Eviction (1988/2004), The Drain (1989) and Jell-O (1995). Speaking of the
micro-gesture of the presumably homeless man sitting on a city sidewalk clenching one fist and
squeezing a carton of milk with the other so that milk virtually explodes into the air, in Milk, Wall has
said, “The white man’s gesture is welling up with incredible rapidity from his own personality, and he
hasn’t any control over the expression.” Wall, in Barents, 101.
144
reflex actions, involuntary, compulsive responses. Reduced to the
level of emissions of bio-mechanical or bio-electronic energy, these
actions are not really “gestures” in the sense developed by older
aesthetics. They are…more condensed, meaner, more collapsed, more
rigid, more violent. Their smallness, however, corresponds to our
increased means of magnification in making and displaying images. I
photograph everything in perpetual close-up and project it forward
with a continuous burst of light, magnifying it again, over and above
its photographic enlargement….Possibly, this double magnification of
what has been made small and meager, of what has apparently lost its
significance, can lift the veil a little on the objective misery of society
and the catastrophic operation of its law of value. 326
With his phrase, “the objective misery of society and the catastrophic operation of its
law of value,” Wall has located the subject of his project securely in the realm of the
social, where the socio-economic conditions of his figures reveal through their
gestures their inner conflicts and their anger at the “dirt and ugliness of the way we
have to live.” 327 Moreover, the near-life-size scale of his works, combined with their
fluorescent back-lighting, magnifies these gestures so that the viewer is confronted
with an image that undercuts the expectation of visual pleasure from the illusion of
the lighted image. Speaking further of the social class of the figures in these 1980s
works, Wall said,
To me, the figure of the lower middle class and working class man,
woman, or child is the most precise image of this ruin. Here we can
also locate the image of the destitute person, who is always part of the
working class, the sub-proletariat. But this ruined person, or ruined
class, can be looked at in different, even completely opposed ways.
It’s very possible to use this image of a ruined class as consolation and
reinforcement, to absolutize the ruination of things and thereby come
to the view that this is the eternal order of nature. Benjamin called this
“left-wing melancholy”. I feel that it is most true to see both the
existing damage and at the same time to see the possibilities which
have been covered over by that damage. The effects of capitalism are
like scar tissue which has encrusted a living body. This living body
326
Jeff Wall, “Gestus,” in de Duve, et al., 76; Wall’s use of the Latin word gestus for his title is further
evidence of his reliance on Brecht.
327
Wall, in Barents, 102.
145
retains the possibility to become something else, although it will have
to become that carrying its scars and wounds along with it. 328
Wall’s interest in the sub-proletariat class and the ruinous effects of late
capitalism reveal his fundamentally Marxist orientation in the first decade of his
mature praxis and his familiarity with the writings of Benjamin and Brecht. The last
three sentences of the quotation, however, give an inkling of the possibility of, as
Wall says, becoming something else. Thus, he shows figures who are in “liminal, or
threshold” situations, in crises, in which “a person is both himself and not himself at
the same instant. This non-identity with oneself is the germ of all transformation and
development.” Further,
I think it’s possible, through the complex effects of techniques derived
from painting, cinema and theatre, to infuse the photographic medium
with this dialectic of identity and non-identity. And the reason I want
to do this is to represent both the surface of damaged life, and its
opposite, the possibility of another life, one which will come out of
this one as its negation….We can imagine it, we can make pictures of
it. So when we experience the picture, we experience a kind of
dissociation. The key experience for modernist art is this dissociation
of identity, I think. In it, we see both our actual existence for what it is
and, at the same time, catch a glimpse of something extremely
different. Something better. 329
328
This statement was made during an interview conducted in connection with an exhibition of his
work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in September 1985. Ibid., 95. “This ruin” refers to
Walter Benjamin’s phrase the “ruins of the bourgeoisie,” which Benjamin quoted from Honore de
Balzac in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 87, and repeated in “Paris, the Capital of the
Nineteenth Century.” The source of the phrase “left-wing melancholy” is an eponymous essay
published by Benjamin in 1931 in which he criticized the writer Erich Kastner for writings critical of
the status quo that did not engender action: “In short, this left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude
to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action….For from the beginning all
it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet.” Later in the essay, Benjamin praised Brecht,
whose writings created needed tension between professional and private life: “To create it is the task of
all political lyricism, and today this task is most strictly fulfilled by Bertolt Brecht’s poems. In
Kastner, it has to give way to complacency and fatalism.” Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,”
in Selected Writings 2: 423-27. Wall’s several references to Benjamin in the quoted passage are
augmented by a statement in the same interview that he had been “strongly influenced by the
discussions and disagreements that Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno had during the late 1930s.”
Wall, in Barents, 102.
329
Wall, in Barents, 102-03.
146
The possibility of change is expressed also at the end of Benjamin’s What is
Epic Theatre [First Version] in his discussion of man’s capacity for recognition and
change while watching an epic theater performance:
The simple fact that man can be recognized in a certain way creates a
sense of triumph, and the fact, too, that he can never be recognized
completely, never once and for all, that he is not so easily exhaustible,
that he holds and conceals so many possibilities within himself (hence
his capacity for development), is a pleasurable recognition. That man
can be changed by his surroundings and can himself change the
surrounding world, i.e. can treat it with consequence, all this produces
feelings of pleasure. 330
Wall’s idea that a photograph can show a person in the process of
transformation draws directly upon Brecht’s directive that the actors in epic theater
stand apart from their roles to resist identification with the characters they play, thus
enabling the audience to gain distance and make judgments or “cast votes.” 331 Wall
has taken on the task of showing in a single image persons whose “ruined” social
conditions the spectator can recognize, while he perceives at the same time the
figures’ non-identification with those conditions and, thus, gains a glimmer of hope
that change is possible. Wall’s use of actors in his photographs is intended to project
330
Benjamin, What is Epic Theatre [First Version], 13. The Second Version includes no such
discussion.
331
In an essay titled “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” Brecht described how epic
theatre was instructive: “Not only did the background adopt an attitude to the events on the stage—by
big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere, by projecting documents which confirmed
or contradicted what the characters said, by concrete and intelligible figures to accompany abstract
conversations, by figures and sentences to support mimed transactions whose sense was unclear—but
the actors too refrained from going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character
they were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him. The spectator was no longer in any way
allowed to submit to an experience uncritically…by means of simple empathy with the characters in a
play. The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process
of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding….And as the ‘background’ came to
the front of the stage so people’s activity was subjected to criticism. Right and wrong courses of
action were shown. People were shown who knew what they were doing, and others who did not. The
theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for such philosophers as wished not just to explain
the world but also to change it.” Brecht, 71-72.
147
a sense of non-identification or alienation because the actors are playing roles that
diverge from their personal situations. In this process, Wall hoped to generate an
identity crisis in the spectator:
In general, my primary objective is to create a sort of identity crisis
with the viewer in some form, maybe even a subliminal one….Another
way of looking at it is that one sets in motion a sequence of
identifications, recognitions, mis-recognitions, de-identifications and
re-identifications, in which the audience is continually decomposed,
fractured, reformed and re-identified with itself. 332
The task that Wall described with respect to his earlier works was enormously
ambitious. Each image stands alone, having no specific relationship to any other.
Although numerous works of the 1980s depict persons who might be recognized as
“sub-proletariat,” each work shows different people in different contemporary
contexts and conditions. Moreover, there is no directive to exhibit them in a way that
connects them. 333 Therefore, the viewer is expected to apprehend a layered set of
ideas while viewing a single apparently unified picture, the subject matter of which is
in some way internally riven. The viewer is expected to understand the condition of
the actors, to see that one or more of them are beginning a process of transformation,
332
Wall, in Clark, Guilbaut and Wagner, 8.
John Roberts has suggested that montage underpins Wall’s works through his use of the genre of
the everyday and the emphasis on dialogue within his works: “The dialogue between two individuals
we find in many of his works, and the dialogue between their lives and the social setting we see them
in, form the basis for the dialogue between multiple voices in the panoramic images and between the
voices in different images themselves.” Based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, Roberts sees
different class positions included within the single panoramic photographic space and within the work
as a whole. John Roberts, 190. I disagree to the extent that the works are not necessarily shown
together, or in any particular combination if they are. They do not form a series, and there is not a
reasonable way for a viewer to apprehend them in combination without making a comprehensive study
of Wall’s oeuvre. Moreover, the class position that predominates is what Wall has called the
“lumpenproletariat” or “subproletariat.” Roberts concedes later in his essay that “Wall’s dialogic
inclusiveness produces a totalizing consciousness out of a multiplicity of subject positions internal to
the working class and the dominated (Asian factory workers, native Indians, the unemployed, petty
criminals, impoverished mothers).” (p. 192). This study identifies a number of ways that Wall’s work
is fissured, but the depiction of multiple class positions, particularly in the works of the 1980s to which
Roberts refers, is not one of them.
333
148
and, simultaneously, take comfort in the possibility of something better for those
persons, or for society at large. And, at the same time, it is hoped that the viewer will
experience a personal transformation. 334
In stark contrast to Wall’s singular transparencies, Brecht’s epic theater
involved plays of traditional length, divided into scenes and acts, with narratives that
progressed, however haltingly. There were many opportunities for disruptions and
lessons of various kinds through the course of the play by means of projections of text
between acts, musical interludes, and, of course, gestures. 335 For example, in Mann
ist Mann, Galy Gay used the same gesture in non-contiguous scenes to renounce the
fish he wanted to buy and to accept the elephant, thus challenging the audience to
notice that the same gesture can have diametrically opposed meanings, depending on
the context. 336
In “What is Epic Theatre [First version],” Benjamin described the notion of
“dialectic at a standstill” in which he explained that the sequence of scenes is not as
important as the gestural elements in which actors represent conditions: “The thing
that is revealed as though by lightning in the ‘condition’ represented on the stage—as
a copy of human gestures, actions and works—is an immanently dialectical attitude.
334
In “Studies for a Theory of Epic Theatre,” Benjamin described the relationships within epic theater
that were dialectical: “that of the gesture to the situation, and vice versa; that of the actor to the
character represented, and vice versa; that of the attitude of the actor, as determined by the authority of
the text, to the critical attitude of the audience, and vice versa; that of the specific action represented to
the action implied in any theatrical representation.” The supreme dialectic was the dialectic between
recognition and education. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 23-25.
335
“Epic theatre proceeds by fits and starts, in a manner comparable to the images on a film strip. Its
basic form is that of the forceful impact on one another of separate, sharply distinct situations in the
play. The songs, the captions, the gestural conventions differentiate the scenes. As a result, intervals
occur which tend to destroy illusion.” Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre [Second Version],” 21.
336
Benjamin, “What is Epic Theater [First version], 12. Benjamin made similar comparisons from
other plays in “What is Epic Theater [Second Version] in discussing “The Quotable Gesture,” 19.
149
The conditions which epic theatre reveals is the dialectic at a standstill.” 337 This
would suggest that a single image can be dialectical, or instructive, and the revelation
by “lightning” could even suggest a tableau or a photograph. Yet, within epic theater,
the poses and postures—the imitations of conditions—are always shown within the
context of the play, and their meaning is necessarily enhanced by repetition and
juxtaposition, as indicated by Benjamin in his examples of the use of the same gesture
to mean two different things. That kind of “learning opportunity” is not present in
Wall’s work with each image standing on its own.
Wall has spoken of providing a “complicated glimpse of something
better….The glimpse of something ‘other’ which you experience in art is always a
glimpse of something better because experiencing art is, as Stendhal said, the
experience of a ‘promesse de bonheur,’ a promise of happiness.” When asked how
his pictures that show the oppression and unhappiness of the present offer a promise
of happiness, Wall replied, “I always try to make beautiful pictures.” 338 Thus, he
locates the possibility of change in the very nature of his medium, in its spectacular,
lighted, pictorial essence.
The making of beautiful pictures of the ruins of the bourgeoisie is the critical
paradox of Wall’s work. It mixes the pleasure of viewing with the dialectical
experience of confronting gestures that reveal social and economic discord. It
therefore contradicts the exclusively educative function of art advocated by Brecht
337
Ibid. Further, “The damming of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow comes to a
standstill, makes itself felt as reflux: this reflux is astonishment. The dialectic at a standstill is its real
object.” Ibid., 13.
338
Wall, in Barents, 104. Wall’s stated goal of making beautiful pictures underlies his unease with
Benjamin Buchloh’s valorization of certain kinds of Conceptual Art, as expressed in Wall’s 1981
essay, “A Draft for ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,’” referred to in Chapter Two. In essence, it
distinguishes Wall’s praxis from what he considers a “defeatist” approach to art-making, which he
identifies with both Adorno and Buchloh.
150
and Benjamin, who would permit only intellectual pleasure. Having chosen the
support of the illuminated transparency in tableau format, Wall has resisted
postmodern strategies based on an obviously ruptured image or a disruptive
apparatus. Instead, he devised a methodology reliant upon subject matter, gesture,
and the sheer shock of depiction for providing critical commentary upon
contemporary capitalist society.
In light of the foregoing discussion, it would seem more than fair—in fact,
imperative—to return to Wall’s photographic tableau of The Destroyed Room and
connect it with Benjamin’s literary tableau of a devastated interior. As has been
demonstrated, Wall consciously and repeatedly quoted Brecht and Benjamin and their
theories of epic theater and the shock or astonishment that it could generate through
the use of gesture. If his choice of support does not satisfy contemporary art
historians who insist on being true to the theories of the 1920s and 1930s, it is not
because Wall does not understand them. He has elected to use the pictorial essence of
the lighted transparency to magnify and illuminate the gestures and conditions of
today’s ruined bourgeoisie.
There are other views, however, of the degree to which the Brechtian formula
should be expected to work. Brecht himself expressed the limits of epic and didactic
theater in terms of locales and circumstances:
Up to now favourable circumstances for an epic and didactic theatre
have only been found in a few places and for a short period of
time….It demands not only a certain technological level but a
powerful movement in society which is interested to see vital
151
questions freely aired with a view to their solution, and can defend this
interest against every contrary trend. 339
Theodor Adorno, colleague and critic of Walter Benjamin, expressed strong
skepticism that dialectical art could be expected to alter human behavior. Susan
Buck-Morss has asserted that, in contrast to Brecht, Adorno’s theory did not include a
theory of political action, and that “he never fully explained the nature of the
relationship between theory and social change.” This position placed him at odds
with Brecht, who claimed, “that the artist had to ally himself with the workers’ cause
and appeal to the empirically existing consciousness of the proletariat for the purpose
of political education. But Adorno insisted that the criterion for art could not be its
political effect on the audience.” 340
More recently, within the decade in which Wall’s use of gestus was most
evident, cultural critic Fredric Jameson labled the period “postmodern” and
admonished readers to historicize their views. Referring specifically to Brecht,
Jameson said,
The teaching function of art was, however, always stressed in classical
times (even though it there mainly took the form of moral lessons),
while the prodigious and still imperfectly understood work of Brecht
reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and original way, for the
moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception of the
relationship between culture and pedagogy….We cannot… return to
aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and
dilemmas which are no longer ours. 341 (Emphasis added.)
339
Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre, 76. According to
the translator’s Note, this essay is believed to have been written in 1935 or 1936, but it was
unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime.
340
Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and
the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 24, 34.
341
Jameson, 50. The quoted essay was first published in New Left Review no. 146 (July-August 1984):
59-92. Jameson adopted Ernest Mandel’s division of capitalism into three temporal stages: market
capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and what Jameson terms “multinational
capital” or “late capital,” corresponding to the period of postmodernism. Ibid., 35.
152
The italicized phrase stresses the importance for Jameson of linking forms of cultural
production and critique to the socio/economic milieu in which the subject of the
critique arises. Thus, Brecht’s concept must be evaluated in light of its time and
place, Germany during the rise of National Socialism. That was a period of
burgeoning technology within the era of high modernism and what Jameson refers to
as monopoly capitalism. 342 Aesthetic forms and practices necessarily relate to their
particular situations, and, for the era of postmodernism that is the subject of
Jameson’s essay, he proposes “the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural
form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” 343
Jameson’s principle of historicizing cultural models and criticism is of
particular importance to this study, given the emphasis placed on theories of the
twenties and thirties by artist Jeff Wall and by art historians Rosalind Krauss and
Benjamin Buchloh described in Chapter Two. The question of the applicability of the
ideas of Brecht and Benjamin to late twentieth-century art is an obvious one,
particularly as regards Krauss, who accepts the notion of a postmodern break and has
quoted Jameson at times. To emphasize Jameson’s point, “we cannot…return to
aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which
are no longer ours.”
342
See, also, Doherty, 442-81, in which the author convincingly connects the notion of gestus in epic
theater to the prevalence of physical and psychological aptitude testing for occupational and military
purposes in Germany during and after World War I.
343
Jameson, 51. Colin MacCabe has identified the source of the term “cognitive mapping” as the
geographer Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960). For Jameson, it is “a way of
understanding how the individual’s representation of his or her social world can escape the traditional
critique of representation because the mapping is intimately related to practice—to the individual’s
successful negotiation of urban space.” “Fredric Jameson,” in Colin MacCabe, The Eloquence of the
Vulgar: Language, Cinema and the Politics of Culture (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 123-24.
153
Writing more or less contemporaneously with Buchloh and Krauss, Jameson
was speaking to those who would suggest that his model of cognitive mapping “is in
any way easily vitiated by the conventional post-structural critiques of the ‘ideology
of representation’ or mimesis.” 344 This statement is consistent with a theme that runs
through an earlier essay in which Jameson distinguished the period and theories of
Brecht and Benjamin from those of Theodor Adorno writing after World War II,
asserting that it was no longer a propitious “climate for older, simpler forms of
oppositional art, … whether it be that produced by…Brecht or indeed those
celebrated in their different ways by Benjamin and Bloch.” 345 Calling for aesthetic
forms appropriate to a culture of “post-modernism,” Jameson said,
In these circumstances, indeed, there is some question whether the
ultimate renewal of modernism, the final dialectical subversion of the
now automatized conventions of an aesthetics of perceptual revolution,
might not simply be…realism itself! For when modernism and its
accompanying techniques of “estrangement” have become the
dominant style whereby the consumer is reconciled with capitalism,
the habit of fragmentation itself needs to be “estranged” and corrected
by a more totalizing way of viewing phenomena….If the diagnosis is
correct, the intensification of class consciousness will be less a matter
of a populist or ouvrierist exaltation of a single class by itself, than of
the forcible reopening of access to a sense of society as a totality and
reinvention of the possibilities of cognition and perception that allow
social phenomena to become transparent, as moments of struggle
between classes. 346
Although this essay was written in 1977 as a conclusion to the original publication of
Aesthetics and Politics, it stands as criticism of the practice of bringing theories of a
long-departed era to bear on art of the late twentieth century. It is important to note
that its publication occurred one year before Wall very directly addressed issues of
344
Ibid., 51.
Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980),
208.
346
Ibid., 211-12.
345
154
late capitalism in his first large transparency, The Destroyed Room. Moreover,
Jamison seems to call for a “transgression of transgression,” or the rejection of
aesthetic fragmentation as a formulaic approach, which, as discussed earlier, is very
much the way Wall talked about his shift from conceptual photographic art to largescale pictorial transparencies. 347
Wall sees his art as a continuation of modernism, denying the validity of a
postmodernist “break,” and, thus, his employment of Brecht’s theories is even more
complex. Wall speaks Jameson’s language about late capitalism and commodity
culture, and, in part, his work is emblematic of Jameson’s notion of the merger or
collapse of the distinction between the cultural and the economic by his production of
spectacular artworks in an advertising format. The Destroyed Room, in particular, is a
cogent demonstration of the integration of aesthetic and commodity production, and
its first showing in a street-level gallery window was an enactment of that idea.
Moreover, the initial period of Wall’s mature praxis coincided with Jameson’s view
that the “cultural dominant” of postmodernism began in 1973: Wall’s first work was
produced in 1978, and his most socially critical images were produced in the 1980s,
the decade during which Jameson wrote frequently on postmodernism and spoke of
the prevalence and importance of photography in that period. 348
347
Wall, “Marks of Indifference.” See, also, Wall’s adamant rejection of aesthetic fragmentation in
Jeff Wall, “An Artist and His Models: Roy Arden,” Parachute 74 (April-May-June 1994): 4-11.
348
See, for example, Jameson’s reference to “the remarkable current intensification of an addiction to
the photographic image,” in “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 18; “In the visual arts the
renewal of photography as a significant medium in its own right and also as the “plane of substance” in
pop art or photorealism is a crucial symptom of the same process.” Fredric Jameson, “Theories of the
Postmodern,” in Postmodernism, 64; and “(whereas [photography’s] ultimate achievement of this
status in the postmodern involved a demotion of painting and “art” as such),” in “Immanence and
Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse,” in Postmodernism, 214.
155
The foregoing is not an attempt to argue that Wall’s work and Jameson’s
conception of the mutual infection of culture and commodity are completely
congruent. Jameson cited the example of the “neofigurative” painting of artist David
Salle, whose work exhibited multiple panels and images that could not be deciphered
in a coherent way, as reflective of the postmodern condition. 349 Further, he described
the photography exhibited in a 1988 exhibition as follows:
In this respect, then, it seems useful and instructive to juxtapose this
practice of fragmentation within the picture—dyptich framing,
sequential collage, scissored images, which it may be best to term
screen segmentation—as it is practiced in what I’m tempted to call the
base-and-superstructure features of David Salle and also in various
ways in the photographers exhibited here: Wasow’s rephotographed
and recombined images, Simpson’s “iris”es and illustrative captions,
Larry Johnson’s mottoes, Cypis’s multipaneled anatomy exhibits,
Welling’s literal analyses; even Wall’s transparencies may be looked
at in this way, if the actual photograph is separated from the luminous
or even stereoscopic performance to which it is subjected (like a
dimension underneath, rather than, as in Salle, the overprint or the side
by side). 350
In the quoted passages, Jameson was not interested in evaluating either Salle’s
painting or the photographers’ works from an ideological point of view or even an
aesthetic one, but in describing them in ways showed their alignment with the cultural
dominant he saw in society at large. I would argue that his inclusion of Wall’s
transparencies within the postmodern paradigm exemplified by Salle and the others is
349
“It strikes one then, in that spirit, that neofigurative painting today is very much that extraordinary
space through which all the images and icons of the culture spill and float, haphazard, like a logjam of
the visual, bearing off with them everything from the past under the name of “tradition” that arrived in
the present in time to be reified visually, broken into pieces, and swept away with the rest. This is the
sense in which I associated such painting with the term deconstructive, for it constitutes an immense
analytic dissection of everything and a lancing of the visual abscess.” Fredric Jameson, “Utopianism
after the End of Utopia,” in Postmodernism, 175; previously published as “Postmodernism and
Utopia,” in Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and
Photography, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 11-32.
350
Ibid., 176.
156
expansive, given that the phrase “luminous or even stereoscopic performance” seems
to be a criticism of the lightbox support. 351
The larger point is that as products of the postmodern period, Jeff Wall’s
transparencies need not be dismissed for their lack of rupture in the Brecht/Benjamin
sense. Brecht himself asserted that epic theater could be effective only in particular
social conditions. Moreover, if some of Wall’s works quote or reformulate historic
paintings, Jameson would include that practice within the phenomenon of “pastiche”
that he saw as emblematic of the era, and not as a fatal transgression of an ahistorical
ideological perspective. 352
Borders and Wires
Wall’s outdoor settings are the liminal, unplanned, chaotic borders between
city and suburb, areas that are inherently ugly and typically populated, if at all, by
persons in transit or transition. The settings and the people are on the margins. One
351
The works of Jeff Wall that were included in “Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and
Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, were Bad
Goods (1984), and Abundance (1985). Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in
Recent Sculpture and Photography. Without his being more specific, it is difficult to know exactly
how Jameson identified fragmentation or “screen segmentation” within Wall’s works. It is clear,
however, that he thought that the luminous treatment of the transparency interfered with what was
more important.
352
Jameson described pastiche as emblematic of postmodern cultural production, resulting from the
disappearance of the individual subject, and, along with it, the “increasing unavailability of the
personal style.” He distinguished pastiche from parody: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a
peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.
But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the
satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have
momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.” It is in this context that
Jameson commented on “the remarkable current intensification of an addiction to the photographic
image…a tangible symptom of an omnipresent, omnivorous, and well-nigh libidinal historicism.”
“The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” 16-19. In his descriptions of pastiche in architecture, music,
film and fiction, Jameson was commenting on what he observed. In contrast, in her discussion of Jeff
Wall’s “medium” and its lack of “redemptive possibilities,” Rosalind Krauss dismissed Wall’s
cinematographic transparencies as “reworkings of old master art…[not] more ambitious than pastiche.”
Krauss, “…And Then Turn Away?”, 10, 29. She cited Jameson’s essay as the first to characterize
“postmodernist art as inherently infected by pastiche” (n. 29, p. 10), but, as examined in Chapter Two
of this study, found the failure in Wall’s work to be a deficiency inherent in his medium stemming
from his failure to “reinvent” it.
157
of the clearest representations of this concept appears in A Villager from Aricakoyu
Arriving in Mahmutbey—Istanbul, September, 1997 (1997) [fig. III-4], in which a
young man arrives on foot on the outskirts of Istanbul. 353 Such an arrival carries with
it hope for the future, yet the apparent poverty of the young man, indicated by the fact
that he is walking and his baggy clothes and small bag, cast doubt on the likelihood
that his life will be appreciably better. The scrubby, patchy vegetation along the
poorly-paved road is littered with trash and is traversed by a crooked path leading
toward some industrial buildings in the distance, not far from a sea of small row
houses. The houses appear to be of recent, cheap construction, and are dwarfed by
the towers of a nearby mosque. The transition that the young man is making portends
a modest outcome at best. Thus, the subject matter of this image undermines its scale,
light and color by suggesting a situation that is ambiguous and that raises concern that
a young man coming to the city from a small town faces dirt, crowded housing,
perhaps overwhelming religious oversight and ugliness—the dirt and ugliness with
which we have to live. This image engenders contemplation, if not shock, in the
viewer.
A notable feature of this image is the presence of seven communication and
transmission wires that cross the picture at angles from just below center to the upper
edge, in a pattern that obstructs and nearly dominates the scene. The wires and the
poles to which they are attached constitute forms of visual interference common in
the contemporary landscape, at the same time that they facilitate communication and
the transmission of power, two essential concomitants of modern life. Here, they
353
This work was photographed in the location indicated in the title, using as a model a person who
had arrived in Istanbul a few weeks before Wall met him. He was engaged to re-enact his arrival for
the photograph. The image was digitally montaged. JWCR, 385.
158
serve to emphasize the unattractive and uninspiring nature of the city’s outskirts. The
traditional notion of landscape as bucolic or idyllic is significantly disrupted.
A third form of visual disruption is also important. An artifact of Wall’s
technology is a very narrow black seam that joins two panels of the transparency in
the larger images. 354 Conceptually, the seam serves to emphasize the constructed
nature of the work—it is literally pieced together. Although the seams are not visible
in reproduction, one is acutely aware of them when viewing the works in person.
They are hard not to notice and, then, not to look for. They disrupt vision and disturb
viewing pleasure.
Three other works that are emblematic of Wall’s depiction of unattractive
sites of urban sprawl are Steves Farm, Steveston (1980), Bad Goods (1984), and
Diatribe (1985). Steves Farm [fig. III-5], Wall’s first documentary photograph, is a
remarkable demonstration of the encroachment of the suburbs on farm land, as a
housing development seen in the in the distance on the right side of the picture seems
to march across the landscape. On the left two horses graze on the farm not far from
the road, and their small field is crowded by farm buildings, some dilapidated houses
and piles of junk. The panoramic image is cropped so that it is nearly four times as
wide as it is high, compounding the claustrophobic sense of space. The expanding
suburbs are extinguishing the farm.
Bad Goods [fig. III-6] is another liminal, transitional site traversed by power
lines in the background that cross near a warehouse and a line of storage tanks that
are surrounded by the detritus of recent construction that no one has cleaned up.
354
The maximum dimension of a transparent panel is 50 inches, thus any work with a greater
dimension in both directions will require fabrication and a seam, which is always visible. Peter
Galassi, “Unorthodox,” in Jeff Wall, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 26.
159
These are examples of the ubiquitous unchecked sprawl of commodity culture. In the
foreground, heads of iceberg lettuce (wrapped in cellophane, with some partly open)
have been spilled from boxes onto the ground, becoming sandy and left to rot. A
Native American stands in the middle ground, near other dumped trash and behind
the lettuce that he may hope to scavenge. It seems that he is aware of the viewer, who
monitors and arrests his behavior. The triangulation among the figure, the “bad
goods” and the viewer is arresting in itself. As with most of Wall’s images, this one
was taken in Vancouver and foregrounds the tension between the Native American
minority, whose land has been scarred by warehouses and dumps, and the presumably
Caucasian viewer who is assumed to have scarred it. This picture is disrupted not so
much by visible fissures, but by the racial and economic tensions that are its subjects.
Moreover, an element reminiscent of The Destroyed Room is present in the discarded
abundant commodities that no one in the dominant culture has bothered to retrieve.
Diatribe [fig. III-7] shows two women walking along an unpaved path littered
with trash, near houses overwhelmed by dangerous power lines. The Caucasian
woman, who holds a young child, is talking animatedly to the African-American
woman, as if telling her a profound truth or complaining about an injustice. There
must be a message relating to race relations between women of similar economic
circumstances and power. Ambiguity and discomfort emanate from the dirty,
scrubby setting and the circumstances of the women. As with all of these images,
there is a stark discrepancy between the illuminated, commercial support and the
subject matter.
160
Perhaps the most dramatically discordant and disrupted image within Wall’s
work of the 1980s is The Storyteller (1986) [fig. III-8]. Six individuals sit on the
ground as though in a pastoral setting around a small fire, only to be overwhelmed by
a highway bridge that veers into the picture from the right. Two sets of cables bisect
the image at eye level. Raised highway signs block what would otherwise be the
vanishing point formed by the bridge and a row of trees on the left. Transportation
and communication infrastructures have relegated these Native Americans to the
interstices of the contemporary landscape as they continue their tradition of
storytelling, one of the earliest forms of human communication. 355 The physical
ruptures within this picture confine descendants of the earliest settlers of this land to a
desolate strip. Moreover, the discarded fast-food wrappings that litter the ground are
evidence that they were not cooking a meal, as would have been the tradition, so even
their diets and health may have been compromised.
Each of the images described above shows the encroachment of the built
environment on the land in the era of late capitalism. The places where city meets
country are ugly, with their obvious absence of planning or concern with architecture,
and they are dirty. 356 Some reflect tensions as people encounter others whom they
355
Wall’s image of the storyteller, as mentioned above, seems a reference to the writings of Walter
Benjamin, in that his essay “The Storyteller” laments the lost art of oral communication of a group’s
multi-generational history: “One meets with fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale
properly….It is as if a capability that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, has
been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.” Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the
Works of Nikolai Leskov,” 143.
356
One might compare Wall’s liminal sites around Vancouver to some of Ludwig Meidner’s
“apocalyptic landscapes” of the desolate outskirts of Berlin in the early twentieth century, again
invoking an earlier period of modernism and another era of ugly urban sprawl. See, for example,
plates 3, 6, 68, 69 and 78 (all 1910-1913) in Carol S. Eliel, The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig
Meidner (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989). Although, of course, one could
not compare Meidner’s agitated expressionist painting style to Wall’s photographs, his depictions of
the edges of a rapidly expanding metropolis seem consonant with Wall’s selections of semi-urban
sites, as well as noting the physical and moral decay of a promised era of economic and social
161
might not have met in an earlier era, and all are forced to make transitions and
adjustments. These pictures are not shocking in the sense that Brecht or Benjamin
would have prescribed, yet, their difficult subjects and visual disruptions do engender
discomfort and thought. The images are familiar, as the outskirts of Vancouver could
be those in any North American or European city, or even Istanbul. They show the
world and its people in transition in an un-idealized environment within the
globalized economy. They merge culture and commodity, a combination that is
aesthetic in Wall’s transparencies only until you really see what is in the picture.
The Radical Oblique and the Abject Subject
According to the surrealist Georges Bataille, “It seems that the desire to
see is stronger than horror or disgust.” 357 Jeff Wall has produced a number of
transparencies that show abject subjects and substances, often in tightly-cropped
smaller pictures. In order to force the viewer to look even more closely, Wall has
made use of diagonal and oblique views that serve to prolong the experience of
looking at worn, scarred, dirty and extremely unaesthetic sights.
In Diagonal Composition (1993) [fig. III-9], Diagonal Composition No.
2 (1998) [fig. III-10], and Diagonal Composition No. 3 (2000) [fig. III-11] Wall has
created a group of images whose titles provide an immediate clue to their theoretical
precursors. These are closely-cropped views of fragments of rooms that one normally
would not focus on. The first two images show parts of a stained sink surrounded by
improvement. Thomas Crow has noted a resemblance between the “suburban terrain vague” depicted
in Diatribe and Van Gogh’s The Outskirts of Paris (1886), used as a basis for discussion in Chapter
One of T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 25-31. Crow, 162.
357
Georges Bataille, “X Marks the Spot,” Documents 2, no. 7 (1930): 438; Oeuvres completes, vol. 1,
p. 256, cited in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone
Books, 1997), 43, 260.
162
stained formica and other scarred, faux, outmoded materials, as well as a piece of
trash and a dirty bar of soap in the first case, and a discarded rubber or plastic glove
in the second. The third diagonal image is that of a portion of the floor and parts of a
wall and a wooden cabinet that form a corner of a room that includes a filthy, splayed
rag mop and a metal bucket containing water through which the rusty bottom of the
bucket is visible. The floor is covered with dirty, scarred linoleum in which worn
patches reveal the underlying wood. The diagonal compositions are documentary
photographs from a body of work that Wall began in 1990 that does not involve any
intervention by the artist. 358
The impact of the diagonal compositions arises from a combination of four
means of forcing the spectator to confront abject subject matter: small format; tight
cropping of the image close to the picture plane; oblique perspective; and, of course,
vivid illumination. The small format and tight cropping combine to force the viewer
to approach the works closely in order to apprehend their details. Unlike the largeformat cinematographic transparencies that are nearly life-scale and allow the viewer
to stand back and feel a bodily connection to the scene, these smaller works operate
more like a miniature jeweler’s window, as a lure to draw one in. When the spectator
arrives at the image, however, he finds not a jewel but a disgusting scene that Wall
has photographed in minute detail and lurid color. One feels that he is all too close to
the stained sink, the dirty, cracked soap, the ancient gray mop and the rusty water. At
the same time, the colors of the objects in these works, however scarred and stained,
possess their own beauty: the yellow and blue of Diagonal Composition, the
turquoise wall and blue ink-like stains of Diagonal Composition no. 2, and the
358
JWCR, 326; 11n11.
163
turquoise wall that forms a background for the galvanized bucket of Diagonal
Composition no. 3.
The third aspect of the diagonal compositions that affects viewing is the
vertical, oblique angle with which they were photographed. The angle is more
pronounced in the first and third images than the second, although it is present there,
too. This perspective causes the viewer to rotate the image mentally in order to
decipher the subject and orient his body in relation to it. Diagonal Composition
appears initially to be a geometric abstraction until one rotates it about 45 degrees to
comprehend the sink, counter and wall, and to notice a small triangular fragment of
dirty fabric that hangs down from the upper edge just to the left of center. The
downward trajectory of Diagonal Composition no. 2 requires a mental up-tilting of
the picture plane in order to recognize the sink and adjacent wooden countertop,
since, initially, the sink appears to be inches from the floor. In both of the first two
images, depth perception and traditional perspective are thwarted by the close
proximity of the walls behind the sinks.
In contrast, the vertical oblique angle of Diagonal Composition no. 3 is not so
confusing because it was shot from a slightly more distant position and is larger than
the others, 359 and the mop and bucket—notably a triangle and a near-circle—are
instantly recognizable apart from the wall, cabinet and floor. Here, also, Wall has
created something of a traditional vanishing point by centering the point where the
floor, wall and cabinet intersect. This play on perspective and geometry seems
359
Diagonal Composition is 40 x 46 cm; Diagonal Composition no. 2 is 52.5 x 64 cm; and Diagonal
Composition no. 3 is 74.5 x 94 cm.
164
contrived, yet it required the artist simply to circle the scene until he found himself
and his camera lens in the proper location.
In the geometricity and oblique angles of the diagonal compositions, Wall has
once again invoked theories of the early twentieth century, particularly those of
Russian formalist writers and constructivist artists. 360 Within the concept of
ostranenie, or making strange, propounded in 1916 by Formalist Viktor Shklovsky,
was embedded the utopic belief that radically oblique angles that undermined the
illusion of traditional one-point perspective could serve to destroy old habits of vision
and reconstruct the subject/viewer. 361 Although Shklovsky’s ostranenie was a purely
aesthetic concept related to the renewal of perception, 362 the goal of reconstructing
the viewer, and, through him, society, became a political one consistent with the
advanced society that post-revolutionary Russia was believed to exemplify, or to be
in the process of developing. Those goals were evidenced in the work of the writers
and artists of the early 1920s associated with the journal Lef. In an era in which
photography and film were considered revolutionary means of making art that could
have the intended social effects, the “radical oblique” perspective was prevalent in
photography. The 90-degree angle can be seen, for example, in Aleksandr
Rodchenko’s photographs of his Moscow apartment building taken from the roof or
360
Connections of these images to Suprematism, Constructivism and the De Stijl group have been
proposed by Rolf Lauter, ed., Jeff Wall: Figures and Places—Selected Works 1978-2000 (Munich,
London, New York: Prestel; Frankfurt: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 2001), 50-53. Briony Fer has
also commented on the references in these images to Russian Constructivism in “The Space of
Anxiety,” 23, as has Peter Galassi in “Unorthodox,” 49-50.
361
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as a Device,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and intro.
Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1916), 3-24.
362
Stanley Mitchell, “From Shklovsky to Brecht: Some preliminary remarks towards a history of the
politicization of Russian Formalism,” Screen 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 74-81.
165
the ground, looking downward or upward through stacked balconies. 363 Lef poet
Nicolai Aseev, who lived in the same building, described Rodchenko’s photographs
in a way that revealed the ambitious assumptions underlying this kind of
photography:
Here we have the building from below, obliquely. It recedes, shrinks
in perspective. Here it is falling, disintegrating, crushed under the
weight of its own walls. Here again, as it violently shoots downwards
with all its nine [sic] balconies, which get gradually smaller because
they have been photographed from above. This is a new way of
seeing, to mankind a new and hitherto unknown possibility to see
objects in their exact perspectives, which overthrow every notion of
proportion and relation. [This new vision] sharpens a perceptive
capacity grown blunt and dulled by the habitual view of things (static,
always from the same standpoint). 364
Rodchenko’s views on the revolutionary potential of extreme perspectives in
photography were published in Novy Lef in 1928. In his letter, which comprised an
essay titled “The Paths of Modern Photography,” Rodchenko decried traditional
journalistic photography: “Behind this dangerous stereotype lies the biased,
conventional routine that educates man’s visual perception, the one-sided approach
that distorts the process of visual reason.” 365 He repeatedly disavowed the “bellybutton” view of traditional Albertian one-point perspective, which “gives you just the
sweet kind of blob that you see reproduced on all the postcards ad nauseam….Why
363
See, for example, Plates 2 through 18, each titled House on Myasnicka-Street, 1925, and Plate 116,
Courtyard on Myasnicka-Street, 1928, in Alexander Lavrentjev, Rodchenko Photography, trans. John
William Gabriel (New York: Rizzoli, 1982). Leah Anne Dickerman described the concept of the
radical oblique in “The Radical Oblique: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera-Eye,” Documents 12 (Spring
1998): 22-34. See, also, Dickerman, “Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera-Eye: Lef Vision and the
Production of Revolutionary Consciousness” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997).
364
Lavrentjev, 13, quoting N. N. Aseev, “From the Eighth Floor. A New Way of Seeing the World,”
Vecherniaia Moskva, No. 182, August 2, 1928.
365
Alexander Rodchenko, “The Paths of Modern Photography,” trans. John E. Bowlt, in Photography
in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed. Christopher Phillips
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989) 256-63, 257. This essay was previously
published in Novy Lef, no. 9 (1928): 31-39.
166
bother to look at a factory if you only observe it from afar and from the middle
viewpoint, instead of examining everything in detail—from inside, from above down,
and from below up?” 366
The aim of restructuring vision by means of technology was explored in film
by Dziga Vertov and theorized by Lef writer Ossip Brik. In a 1926 essay Brik briefly
recounted the developing task of the camera, which he stated was “to see and record
what the human eye normally does not see.” 367 For example:
The camera can function independently, can see in ways that man is
not accustomed to—can suggest new points of view and demonstrate
how to look at things differently….This is the kind of experiment that
Comrade Rodchenko undertook when he photographed a Moscow
house from an unusual viewpoint. The results proved extremely
interesting: that familiar object (the house) suddenly turned into a
never-before seen structure, a fire escape became a monstrous object,
balconies were transformed into a tower of exotic architecture. 368
The notion of retraining human vision by making the familiar seem strange,
ostranenie, and making what is easy seem difficult, zatrudnenie, were both ideas of
Viktor Shklovsky, who, as indicated, believed that disrupting cognitive habits was the
purpose of art. 369 By forcing the viewer to perform work in order to grasp what he
perceives, the duration of perception is extended and the viewer becomes aware of the
process he is engaged in. The oblique angles of Rodchenko’s photographs were
intended to disorient the viewer by forcing a discrepancy between the viewer’s
normal point of view and the view of the camera, thus requiring an effort to reconcile
366
Ibid., 259. The “belly-button” view refers to the kind of camera that one would hold at the waist
while looking down into the view-finder.
367
Ossip Brik, “What the Eye Does Not See,” in Phillips, 219.
368
Ibid., 220.
369
Dickerman, “The Radical Oblique,” 31.
167
the conflict by mentally realigning the picture or the body. 370 The re-educated
viewer would presumably be better prepared to participate effectively in the modern
world he inhabited.
The power of the diagonal, in particular, has been examined in its role within
the utopic aims of El Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to
create a new vision, a “New Man,” and, ultimately a new society following the
upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war. 371 In a
desire to counteract bourgeois capitalism’s perceived alienating effects on man and
society, and imbued with the marvels of science, technology and the machine, these
artists believed that society could be reconstructed through production of the right
forms of art. Using science as a paradigm, and embracing a “mechanical aesthetics,”
they aimed for a universal visual literacy that could be achieved particularly through
photography and geometric abstraction. 372 According to Steven Mansbach,
In their desire to create a symbolic form to represent the dynamism of
the emerging epoch in man’s evolution towards freedom and
integration, the artists fastened upon the diagonal….Used pictorially,
the diagonal was felt to be able to engender in the spectator a
psychological sensation of movement; when the right angle is ‘placed
diagonally, then it has a dynamic effect (agitation).’ 373
Moreover, in Van Doesburg’s space-time theory that he called “Elementarism,”
which Mansbach characterizes as “a philosophy of the diagonal in art,” the notions of
370
Ibid., 32. “The power of the oblique to force a conscious repositioning, rather than allow an easy
identification…constituted for Rodchenko and Lef writers the revolutionary potential of the new
perspective. Ibid., 33. See, also, Peter Galassi, “Rodchenko and Photography’s Revolutiion,” in
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman and Peter Galassi (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 101-37.
371
Steven A. Mansbach, Visions of Totality: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Theo Van Doesburg, and El
Lissitzky (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980). See, also, S. A. Mansbach, “Science as Artistic
Paradigm: A 1920s Utopian Vision,” The Structurist, no. 21-22 (1981-1982): 33-39.
372
Mansbach, Visions of Totality, 36-40.
373
Ibid., 45.
168
matter, motion and time could be combined in a manner considered consonant with
then-current scientific theories. 374 For all three of the artists examined, the goal of
constructivist art was to make the viewer an active participant and not merely a
passive observer. Art could “lead to an active participation in workshops and plays,
symposiums, and political discussions. This would create the stimuli for a
rejuvenation of creative citizenship, spontaneity, and an understanding of the needs of
the community.” 375
The concept that art could and should educate modern humans for the task of
withstanding the shocks of existence in an era of rapid technical and social
transformation is, of course, strikingly similar to the montage-based theory of Bertolt
Brecht and Walter Benjamin with respect to the goals of epic theater. Brecht’s term
for “making strange” was Verfremden, by which he meant an alienation effect. As
discussed earlier, Brecht hoped to produce such an effect through ruptures in the
progress of his plays. The exchange of ideas between Moscow and Berlin was
rampant during the 1920s.
Stephen Bann has chronicled some of the connections between the respective
groups of artists and theorists in the two cities, and their sojourns back and forth. In
his discussion of the ideology of Russian Constructivism that emerged in 1920 in
Moscow among the Lef group, he contrasted what he termed “international
constructivism” that followed in Germany, spurred by the Congress of International
Progressive Artists held in Dusseldorf in May 1922, and the exhibition of modern
Russian art that took place at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in that same year
374
Ibid., 49.
Ibid., 52, quoting Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “A Proposal,” (from Vision in Motion), rpt. in Richard
Kostelanetz, ed., Moholy-Nagy (New York: Praeger, 1970), 194.
375
169
propagated by artists such as Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter and Laszlo MoholyNagy. 376 Steven Mansbach has discussed in detail the issues of politics and
propaganda motivating that first exhibition of Russian art (Erste Russiche
Kunstausstellung), including more than 1,000 works, held in the fall of 1922 and
directed not only to Germans, but, also, to the sizable Russian émigré population in
Berlin at the time. 377
Margarita Tupitsyn has discussed similarities between Rodchenko’s and
Brecht’s respective models of art. Asserting that by the late 1920s critics had begun
to criticize Rodchenko for appearing to follow Formalism, which was associated with
trends in Western art, she defended him:
Rodchenko’s model echoed Brechtian aesthetics, which claimed that
“The spirit of realism designates an active, curious, experimental,
subversive…attitude toward…the material world; and the ‘realistic’
work of art is therefore one that encourages and disseminates this
attitude, yet not merely in a flat or mimetic way or along the lines of
imitation alone.” 378
376
Stephen Bann, Introduction to The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (New York:
Viking Press, 1974), xxv-xliv. “Whereas the Russian artist could identify himself with the struggle of
the proletariat through ‘intellectual-material production,’ the European…was forced to concentrate his
attention upon the sheer problem of communication, across existing barriers of nationality and
profession….[W]e must take into account the related fact that if Russian constructivism was obeying a
political and social imperative, international constructivism was obeying an aesthetic imperative.”
Ibid., xxxii-xxxiii; xxxv-xxxvi.
377
S.A. Mansbach, “The ‘First Russian Art Exhibition’ or the Politics of Presentation and
Propaganda,” Artistic Exchange(Kunstlerischer Austausch): Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth
International Congress of the History of Art (Internationalen Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte) Held in
Berlin 15-20 July, 1992, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 307-20.
Manfredo Tafuri has also described the “exceptional concentration of Russian intellectuals in Berlin”
during the early 1920s, including, for example, Shklovsky, Brik and artists El Lissitzky and Wassily
Kandinsky. Manfredo Tafuri, “U.S.S.R.-Berlin, 1922: From Populism to ‘Constructivist
International,’” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the
1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 119-48.
378
Margarita Tupitsyn, “Fragmentation versus Totality: The Politics of (De)framing,” in The Great
Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992),
486, citing Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 2: 141.
170
Stanley Mitchell, too, has connected Brecht to Viktor Shklovsky’s ideas. 379
According to Mitchell, the terms ostranenie and Verfremdung have the same
meaning. Shklovsky’s Formalist and Marxist theories and Brecht’s Marxist ideas,
both based on an aesthetics of shock, were designed to combat the alienation of
consciousness thought to be the product of capitalism. According to Mitchell,
Russian Formalism came into being during the first world war and on
the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution; some of its personalities…were
Bolsheviks. Brecht developed his theory of alienation on the eve of
the fascist counter-revolution as a means to shock people out of a
passive-fatalistic acceptance of authoritarian and manipulative politics.
If, in the general European context, we draw a line back from Brecht
and forward from Shklovsky, we shall find a meeting-point. In the
1920s the Russian Formalists joined forces with the left Futurists to
produce the magazine and forum of LEF and Novy Lef , edited by
Mayakovsky. Brecht’s “epic theatre” drew inspiration from Piscator,
Meyerhold and Eisenstein. The various theories and practices of
montage, functional theatre, documentary may all be brought under the
head of making strange. Russian Formalism was politicized. 380
I would not want to put too fine a point on this discussion of the
connections between Shklovsky and Brecht, because they are extremely complex and
have been given varied interpretations. 381 The thinking of both theorists evolved
during tumultuous political and social conditions under different regimes, and to
construct a definitive explication of their convergences and differences in not a
purpose of this study. The point is that the idea that art could be constructed or
formulated to instruct its audience and, ultimately, to change society, was common to
avant-garde theorists in both post-revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, and
379
Stanley Mitchell, “From Shklovsky to Brecht: Some Preliminary Remarks towards a History of the
Politicisation of Russian Formalism,” Screen 15, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 74-81. Simon Watney has also
discussed the influence of the theory of ostranenie on both German Dada and Bertolt Brecht. Simon
Watney, “Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin
(London: Macmillan, 1982), 161-66.
380
Ibid., 76.
381
See, for example, Ben Brewster, “From Shklovsky to Brecht: A Reply,” Screen 15, no.2 (Summer
1974): 82-99, in which the author disputed a number of Stanley Mitchell’s assertions.
171
their theories, whether Kantian, formalist, futurist or materialist, were circulating in
both Berlin and Moscow.
In Wall’s diagonal compositions, then, one sees the evocation of a
theory of perception designed to challenge the viewer to puzzle over the image,
evidenced, for example, in the constructivist photography of Rodchenko. Although
Wall apparently has not discussed the use of the oblique angle as an instructive device
in the way that he has discussed gestus, in these aptly-titled documentary photographs
the vertiginous angles clearly utilize the radical oblique.382 There are two significant
differences between Wall’s work and Rodchenko’s, however. First, the angles in
Wall’s photographs are not nearly as acute as those in Rodchenko’s, which appear in
may cases to be approximately 90 degrees. In the diagonal compositions, the angles
appear to be closer to 45 degrees, rendering the images less vertiginous and easier to
decipher.
Second, in contrast to the photographs of those who used the vertical
approach in the 1920s and 1930s, including Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, as
another example, 383 the subjects of Wall’s documentary transparencies are not simply
ugly, dirty, scarred objects and corners, but they enter the arena of the abject. The
382
Briony Fer quotes Wall as having told her, however, that “you cannot use a diagonal as Diagonal
Composition does without connoting a certain type of abstract constructivist vocabulary.” Fer, Ibid.,
23.
383
Moholy-Nagy was Hungarian and immigrated to Germany, where he taught from 1923 to 1928 at
the Bauhaus. He was a participant in what Stephen Bann described as international constructivism.
Tafuri described Moholy-Nagy as having an ambiguous political position, along with a belief in a
technological utopia embodied in the machine as a “prime requisite of social transformation.” Tafuri,
142-43. See, also, Mansbach, Visions of Totality. In “The Armed Vision Disarmed: Radical
Formalism from Weapon to Style,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History,
Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 73, Abigail SolomonGodeau traced the dissemination of the revolutionary practices of Russian Formalism—“an optical
analogue to revolution”—to a more theoretical and abstract practice at the Bauhaus under MoholyNagy: “Moholy’s championship of photography…had finally more to do with the widespread
intoxification with all things technological than it did with a politically instrumental notion of
photographic practice.”
172
earlier twentieth-century photographers, who were enthralled with the model of
science, the clean lines of the universal language of geometry, and the possibilities of
the technical apparatus of the camera to “see what the human eye normally does not
see” and to hone the viewer’s perception and political orientation, focused their lenses
on marvels of modernism, such as architecture, machinery and the products of
industry. Rodchenko’s photographs of the apartment house in which he lived,
featuring its balconies, fire escape and modernist design, as well as his pictures of the
grilles of new cars, circular metal printing plates and other industrial objects, sang the
praises of the new Soviet Union. Moholy-Nagy’s well-known photograph taken at a
radically oblique angle from the top of the Berlin Radio Tower was an homage to
modern communications technology and to the tower itself. At the same time, the
versatility of the camera was a demonstration of Rodchenko’s 1934 essay
“Photography-Art:”
Contradictions in perspective. Contrasts in light. Contrasts in forms.
Views impossible to realize with drawing and painting.
Foreshortenings grossly deforming objects, a harsh handling of matter.
Entirely new, never before seen moments in human, animal or
machine movements. 384
Abject subjects
Jeff Wall’s images in the diagonal documentary mode are not hymns to
contemporary society or its technology: they emphasize unaesthetic images and
evidence no vision that could possibly be labeled “utopic.” Peas and Sauce (1999)
[fig. III-12] and Rainfilled Suitcase (2001) [fig. III-13] are, respectively, vertiginous
384
Alexander Rodchenko, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), np., citing German Karginov,
Rodchenko (Paris: Editions du Chene, 1977). See, also, Victor Margolin, “The Politics of Form:
Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy 1922-1929,” in The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky,
Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 123-63.
173
views of a mostly-eaten meal in a discarded, bent aluminum container, and a watery
topless suitcase overflowing with personal possessions and surrounded by trash.
Each was photographed in the alley behind Wall’s studio. 385
It must be emphasized that a color image of a partly-eaten meal taken
from a bird’s-eye view was not original to Wall. Forming an important part of the
immediate historical background to Wall’s mature work were color documentary
images taken by Stephen Shore and William Eggleston during their respective road
trips through parts of the United States from the late 1960s through the 1970s, some
of which were exhibited in New York during the 1970s. 386 In addition, there were
similar Polaroid photographs taken by Walker Evans in the last stage of his career. 387
385
Wall claims to have come upon the object in Peas and Sauce in the alley behind his studio.
Conversation with the author at exhibition opening, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, April 16,
2004.
386
Wall apparently has not acknowledged in writing the influence of any of these bodies of work, and
in a conversation with Shore moderated by Michael Fried at the Baltimore Museum of Art on March 7,
2007, he expressed no particular interest in Shore’s work or the motivations underlying it.
387
Photographing in color when serious “art” photography was always black-and-white, Shore first
showed his color photographs in an exhibition titled “American Surfaces,” at the Light Gallery in New
York in 1972. The collection included numerous images of plates of food either just served on a lunch
counter or table, or partly eaten. In all cases, they were unappetizing. A selection of 312 of the
photographs constituting American Surfaces was exhibited at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in 2005.
See Bob Nikas, American Surfaces: Stephen Shore, exh. cat. (New York: Phaidon, 2005). See, also,
Eggleston’s first work in color in William Eggleston: Los Alamos, exh. cat., ed., Thomas Weski, intro.,
Walter Hopps (Zurich: Scalo, in collaboration with Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2003), that includes
untitled and undated color images from a body of work made on the road between 1966 and 1974.
Having once remarked that “color photography is vulgar,” Walker Evans, at the end of his career, took
more than 2,600 color photographs with a Polaroid SX-70, including close-up view of the remains of a
partly-eaten pie [Pie], 1973-74, from an oblique, downward perspective. Mia Fineman, “‘The Eye Is
an Inveterate Collector’: The Late Work,” in Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas
Eklund and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans, exh. cat., (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000),
131-39; Plate 156. There are other images, particularly by Eggleston, that find striking counterparts in
Wall’s documentary oeuvre. It is hard to know the degree to which striking similarities of subject
matter and perspective should be compared, when the subjects are found in everyday contemporary
culture. But compare, for example, Wall’s Just Washed (1997), a small image of a hand holding out a
stained, but presumably just-washed, white cloth over an open washing machine, with Eggleston’s
untitled image of a worn white sweater laid out to dry on a towel on top of a washing machine.
Another example is William Eggleston’s Black Bayou Plantation, near Glendora, Mississippi, an
image of spilled white plastic bottles in a patch of dirt, which could be a model for Wall’s Bad Goods,
although Eggleston’s photograph lacks a human presence. The Eggleston images appear, respectively,
in William Eggleston: Los Alamos, 163; and in John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide, exh. cat.
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), np. The images are undated, but were part of “an essay of
174
Given Wall’s extraordinary knowledge of the history of photographic imagery, it can
be assumed that he was familiar with some or all of these bodies of work.
For Wall, staining is a repeated motif, beginning with the unidentifiable
stains on the formica countertops of the first two diagonal compositions and the rust
at the bottom of the bucket in Diagonal Composition no. 3. Other examples are Man
in Street (1995) [fig. III-14], Just Washed (1997) [fig. III-15], Rainfilled Suitcase
(2001), Bloodstained Garment (2003) [fig. III-16], and A Wall in a Former Bakery
(2003) [fig. III-17]. The stains on the formica were caused by humans engaged in the
act of cleaning very dirty things, as indicated by the sink and the soap in Diagonal
Composition. The bloodstained garment found on the sidewalk and the face and coat
of Man in Street were stained by a bodily fluid, and the personal and usually private
contents of a suitcase are engulfed in and stained by rainwater. The stains on the wall
and ceiling of the bakery could have been caused by heat or flame, but look
suspiciously like blood or another fluid that has seeped through the plaster.
Moreover, the fragments of the bakery’s wall and ceiling are shown at close range in
a vertiginous upward view. 388
375 pictures completed in 1971.” Szarkowski, 10. The exhibition included 75 of Eggleston’s dyetransfer prints. Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 187.
388
It is impossible not to mention here a striking comparison to William Eggleston’s untitled, 13 x 19
1/8 inch image of a corner showing a portion of a ceiling and parts of the two walls that meet it, taken
from a low-angled, but close-up perspective. The ceiling and walls are blood-red, undoubtedly
intensified by Eggleston’s dye-transfer printing process that permits the manipulation of color. This
work was part of a portfolio titled “William Eggleston: 14 Color Photographs,” included in Renato
Danese, 14 American Photographers (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1974), np. The only
objects visible in the Eggleston work are a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling and fragments of
three pictorial images on the wall, cut off by the cropping of the photograph. In Wall’s bakery image,
one can see a portion of a fluorescent ceiling light fixture in the upper left corner and part of a wall
light fixture on the lower right edge of the picture. The color in Wall’s work is a pale and uneven
stain, whereas Eggleston’s color is luridly intense and unnaturally even.
175
In the images described in the foregoing paragraphs, Wall has invoked
the idea of the abject, focusing on garbage and stained materials that are normally
thrown away and, hopefully, not seen. The notion of the abject emerged in art
practice within Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s, and has been associated with
Bataille and the concept of the informe. Jeff Wall has expressed his interest in some
of the photographic work of the artist Wols. 389
Although better known as an informel painter after World War II, Wols
created a body of photographic work between 1932 and 1941 that has been exhibited
several times since the late 1970s. 390 Wols’s photographs depict many subjects,
including portraits, self-portraits and fashion, but many are objects that suggest or are,
in fact, abject subjects. Typically photographed from a vertical, oblique angle, Wol’s
subjects include raw chicken and rabbit parts, a partly-eaten meal, sausages, beans,
stains on pavements, and a cleaning bucket filled with water and a rag. In his short
piece on Wols, Wall wrote,
Wols has been a big influence on me. By the late 1980s his work
helped me change direction, inspiring me to get more involved with
the fundamental aspects of photography, and, to some extent, to move
away from what I was interested in earlier—the connections between
cinema and photography, and between painting and photography. 391
389
Wall discussed his interest in Wols with Roy Arden in Roy Arden and Jeff Wall, “La Photographie
d’art: Expression parfaite du reportage/ ‘The Dignity of the Photograph,’” Art Press, no. 251
(November 1999): 16-25. Referring to the scratches on Wols’s images, Wall said, “Wols seems to
have had a unique kind of confidence. His pictures seem so unprotected. That’s where the scratches
come in, I think. He totally brushed off the whole ‘official’ element, the official, public side of art.” p.
20. See, also, Jeff Wall, “Wols (Wolfgang Otto Shulze), Untitled (Apple and Pear), ca. 1940-41,” in
Mary Haus, “Struck by Lightning: Photographers talk about images that amazed them, inspired them
and taught them a lesson,” Art News 104, no. 2 (February 2005): 117.
390
See Laszlo Glozer, WOLS Photographe, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978); Ewald
Rathke and Sylvia Rathke-Kohl, Wols: Bilder Aquarelle Zeichnungen Photographien Druckgraphik,
exh. cat. (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich; Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordheim-Westfalen, 1989); and
Christine Mehring, Wols Photographs, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1999).
Wols’s vintage prints are black-and-white and of small scale, typically approximately 24 x 18 cm.
Mehring, 12. They are typically untitled and undated.
391
Wall, “Wols.”
176
It is not difficult to discern the influence. In 1990, Wall began to make some
documentary photographs, and his first two works in that mode were Some Beans
(fig. III-18) and An Octopus (fig. III-19). Those works form a pair, in that they were
taken in the same ugly basement location from the same viewpoint, with the beans on
the left of two wooden tables, and the octopus on the right one (the opposite table is
empty in each picture). Although the subject of each work is potentially edible,
neither is appetizing. The beans are hard and dried, and the octopus appears to be
dead and decaying. 392 Wol’s photograph Untitled (Beans) (ca. 1938-39) [fig. III-20]
shows some string beans on a wooden surface, and the dimpled surface of the beans
coupled with the black-and-white shadowing gives them the appearance of something
that might be, or have been, alive. Wols’s Untitled (Rolled Cheese) (ca. 1938-39)
[fig. III-21] evokes the same sensation, as the three rolled objects have been
described as larvae, or as something “swelling and bursting,” and they lack any
392
Wall said that the octopus was “frozen and thawing.” Wall, Artist’s Talk, lecture given by the artist
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26, 2007. The still life image of this unusual sea
creature—one that is not typically encountered—has an effect on the viewer that could be compared to
that of the ray in Chardin’s well-known canvas titled The Ray (1725-6). Chardin’s painting is said to
have been greatly admired by those who copied or wrote about it, including Diderot. The ray, too, is
an unusual and rather shocking sea animal, especially when gutted and hung from a hook as shown in
Chardin’s painting, where it appears to be staring out at the viewer: “The gutted ray dominates the
composition, a hideous, bloodstained fish with a human face, ‘a terrifying face’, to quote Raymone
Queneau (and Rene Demoris). ‘The object is disgusting [degoutant]’, Diderot comments. Diderot was
the first person to question the contradictions in the painting, its’secret’: how to ‘salvage objects of
disgust through sheer talent’, how to make beautiful things usually held to be ugly; or, to quote Proust,
how to transform a ‘strange monster’ into the ‘nave of a polychrome cathedral’.” Pierre Rosenberg,
ed., Chardin, trans. Caroline Beamish, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux; London:
Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 118. Although the octopus
in Wall’s photograph is not staring at the viewer, the incongruous placement of this “strange monster”
is reminiscent of the “disgusting” ray. It seems fair to make this comparison, given Wall’s obvious
invocation of Chardin’s The Draughtsman (ca. 1734) in Wall’s Adrian Walker, artist, drawing from a
specimen in a laboratory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver
(1992). The Chardin painting is reproduced in Rosenberg, 199. The desiccated, fragmented specimen
of a human arm from which Adrian Walker is drawing is another strange, perhaps uncanny, object.
177
context that would help identify them. 393 Both are disgusting. Moreover, one of
Wol’s images of a dead chicken, Untitled (Chicken Biting Its Leg), (ca. 1938-39) [fig.
III-22], an arrangement that Wols must have manipulated, is as abject as Wall’s dead,
red, and probably malodorous octopus. 394
As described above, Wall began his diagonal compositions in 1993.
Diagonal Composition no. 3 could be a reprisal of Wols’s Untitled (Bucket) (ca.193839) [fig. III-23], a closely-cropped cleaning bucket filled with water with a twisted
rag floating within it, although Wall’s rag is a rag mop, and his bucket contains rusty
water. The scale and perspective of Wall’s diagonal compositions, I would argue, are
indebted to Wols not only because of some obvious similarities, but particularly
because Wall noted those aspects of Wols’s photographs:
Wols shows, with these very simple little pictures, how photography
gets results that Arp or Picasso could get in collage or construction. It
is simple, modest in scale, yet as grand as a mural. 395
393
Mehring, 22.
Wall’s documentary work is described as follows: “The term ‘documentary’ applies to those
photographs in which the artist selects the place and time of taking the picture but without intervening
in the site or situation in any way.” Vischer, Introduction to JWCR, 11n11. The beans and the octopus
on the two tables were obviously placed there by Wall, as confirmed by his statement about the
octopus.
395
Wall, “Wols.” Briony Fer contrasted Wall’s An Octopus and Some Beans with Wols’s still life
pictures of discarded or dead matter, saying that “Wols exacerbated a relation between pleasure and
unpleasure: there is often an almost exquisite precision in the way an object of revulsion, like a carcus,
is placed in a picture.” On the other hand, she saw Wall as more interested in “disturbing the pictorial
field the object inhabits” than with picturing disturbing objects. Fer, Ibid., 26. Peter Galassi, also, has
compared Wall and Wols, and, as Fer, sees the objects in still life images as formal devices rather than
as subjects: “In Some Beans and An Octopus, the caustic torque of Wols’s eccentric still lifes…have
been absorbed into a purely aesthetic realm….while indispensable, the octopus and the beans are not
so much protagonists as excuses for an adventure in picture-making.” Galassi, 48. In this passage,
Galassi was comparing the two photographs also with some of Walker Evans’s, thus compounding the
emphasis on formal considerations. In my view, these writers have missed the impact of the objects on
themselves.
394
178
Wall’s smaller documentary transparencies, including the three diagonal
compositions, Peas and Sauce, Rainfilled Suitcase and A Wall in a Former Bakery
are also grand in their illuminated splendor.
The importance of Wall’s evocation of Wols does not lie solely in the
emulation of particular images, evidencing, again, Wall’s concern with modernist art
history, but in its connection to a body of work that compounds the alienation effects
of Brecht and Rodchenko by adding the aspect of the abject. Wall’s stated interest in
Wols sounds as if he were mostly concerned with formal qualities, yet the
unappetizing subjects that link the two artists serve Wall’s purpose in creating
disgust, if not horror, in the viewer who is lured by his desire to see. 396
The Abject and the Informe
The subject of abjection in art in the late twentieth century seems to
stem, at least to an important degree, from the surrealist writings and images
published by Georges Bataille from 1929 to 1930 in the journal Documents and the
Critical Dictionary. Bataille’s concept was the informe, or the formless, which was
part of a complex philosophy aimed at denigrating classifications and systems of all
sorts. 397 It was an anti-humanist strategy designed to undermine the concept of order,
396
Wall mentioned the “roughness” of Wols’s technique in the treatment of his prints, resulting in
their having “a slightly worn quality.” Wall, “Wols.” See, also, Roy Arden and Jeff Wall, with respect
to Wall’s interest in Wols’s scratched surfaces.
397
Bataille’s definition of “formless” was as follows: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the
meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus, formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but
a term that serves to bring things down in the world. What it designates has no rights in any sense and
gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy,
the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a
frock coat to what is a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe
resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider
or spit.” Georges Bataille, ed., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Comprising the Critical Dictionary and
Related Texts, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 51-52.
179
and, generally, “to bring things down in the world.” It involved far more than the
depiction of unsavory images.
The abject, on the other hand, has been revived as an issue in art more
recently. 398 For example, group exhibitions held at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in 1992 and 1993, respectively, centered on the concept of the abject in
contemporary art and are emblematic of the interest in this issue among certain artists
and curators at that time. 399 Moreover, the concepts of the informe and the abject
have sometimes been conflated in the postmodern period to mean the disturbing and
the disgusting, particularly in association with the female body, bodily fluids, leftover food and dirt.
Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have explored the informe and the
abject, beginning with a published conversation in 1994 in which they and four
colleagues focused on the distinctions between the two terms. 400 Fundamentally, they
regard the informe is regarded as a process, and the abject a subject. The discussants
agreed that the purpose of the informe is to perform a task that debases or
398
Work of Cindy Sherman that has been considered abject could include the “centerfolds,” first
shown in 1981. See Phillips, Cindy Sherman: Centerfolds. The twelve color images, each 24 by 48
inches, are each taken from an oblique, downward angle of a reclining Sherman in a picture closely
cropped and including such disturbing objects as wet hair, a blanket, crumpled paper and a soiled Tshirt. Andy Grundberg wrote that Sherman’s horizontal positions, five on the floor and three in bed, in
addition to a theme of “diffuse yet pervasive anxiety,” counter the allure of the high-contrast color
photographs. Andy Grundberg, “Cindy Sherman: A Playful and Political Post-Modernist,” in Cindy
Sherman: Centerfolds, 43-47. See, also, her “vomit pictures” of the late 1980s and her “sex
pictures”of the early 1990s: Amelia Jones, “Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman, in Cindy
Sherman: Retrospective, exh. cat. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1997), 33-53. See, also, Hal Foster, “The Real Thing,” in Cindy Sherman, exh.
cat., ed. Karel Schampers and Talitha Schoon (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, 1996),
70-95, for a discussion of the “disgust pictures,” including vomit pictures and sex pictures.
399
Jesus Fuenmayor, Kate Haug and Frazer Ward, Dirt & Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine,
exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992); and Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones
and Simon Taylor, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1993).
400
“The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the Informe and the Abject,” October 67
(Winter 1994): 3-21. The other participants were Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Dennis Hollier and
Helen Molesworth.
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transgresses, and it is therefore linked to a performative gesture. Benjamin Buchloh’s
example of an informe act is spitting in soup. Moreover, in a discussion of Warhol’s
take on Pollock’s drip technique, Bois concluded that Warhol’s oxidation paintings,
made by having friends urinate on copper-coated canvases placed on the floor, could
be considered informe:
The reading Warhol makes of Pollock…is a debasing one, contrary to
the classically formalist reading of Pollock that has long been
standard. The task is structured by the historical situation. For
Warhol…it was necessary to read Pollock in ways that directly
contradicted the sublimatory reading that engendered someone like
Morris Louis. 401
According to Krauss, “The word [informe] coins the notion of a job, a process; it is
not merely a way to characterize bodily substances so that the formerly disprivileged
becomes the privileged—as is the case now with art that invokes ‘abjection.’” 402
Julia Kristeva’s 1980 work, translated into English in 1982, hass been
the touchstone for discussions of abjection in the postmodern period. Kristeva
produced a complex psychoanalytic, anthropological, religious and literary
investigation of the notion of abjection in which substances such as urine, blood,
sperm and excrement are considered abject. 403 Kristeva has spoken, particularly, of
food as abject in certain circumstances, with “food loathing…perhaps the most
elementary and most archaic form of abjection.” There is particular repulsion toward
401
Ibid., 9-10.
Ibid. 4.
403
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 53.
402
181
“food remainders:” “Remainders are residues of something but especially of
someone. They pollute on account of incompleteness.” 404
In the 1993 exhibition of abject art at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, abject art was defined as “a body of work which incorporates or suggests abject
materials such as dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood, and rotting
food in order to confront taboo issues of gender and sexuality. This work also
includes abject subject matter—that which is often deemed inappropriate by a
conservative dominant culture.” 405 Noting that the concept of abjection had emerged
as “a central theoretical impulse of 1990s art,” the authors cited Julia Kristeva for the
notion of the blurring of boundaries between self and other, and Georges Bataille for
the notion of “base materialism,” which challenges “established categories of social
taboos through an investigation of degraded elements.” 406
Placing the concept of abjection within the discourse of art since the
early eighties, Simon Taylor discussed abject art as contestatory in its rhetoric of
“contamination” and its “defilement” of the white cube of the gallery. 407 Moreover,
404
Ibid., 75-76. Kristeva wove a complex web around the theories of Bataille, Freud, Lacan, Mary
Douglas and a variety of others, that involves Freudian theories of psychic development and ways in
which certain religions have sacralized abject substances. It would seem that Kristeva distilled the
notion of the abject from Bataille’s surrealist, operational concept to the late twentieth century in a way
that has resulted, perhaps too simplistically, in the distillation of his ideas to bodily fluids and other socalled disgusting substances that are now referred to simply as “abject.” In the conversation referred to
above, there was general agreement that within contemporary art the distinction between subject and
function, or abject and informe, had been blurred by Kristeva in what they regarded as her recuperation
of waste, filth and bodily fluids as abject. Rosalind Krauss made this argument with respect to
reception of Cindy Sherman’s “bulimia” pictures of the late 1980s, particularly that of Laura Mulvey,
who she sees as having contributed to the theorization of the abject as “composed of the infinite
unspeakableness of bodily disgust: of blood, of excreta, of mucous membranes.” Rosalind Krauss,
“The Destiny of the Informe,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, 235-252.
405
Houser, Jones, Taylor and Jack Ben-Levi, Introduction to Abject Art, 7.
406
Ibid. For a more thorough investigation of Bataille’s concept of the informe, its categories of
horizontality, base materialism, pulse and entropy, and connections to particular bodies of twentiethcentury art, see Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide.
407
Simon Taylor, “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art,” in Abject Art, 59-83.
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its emergence during the 1980s involved opposition not only to the theoretically
neutral gallery, but to the turn of United States politics in a more conservative
direction during that decade. For purposes of this study, Taylor’s discussion of Cindy
Sherman’s post-1983 photographs is similar to the argument made here with regard to
Wall’s alluring photographic transparencies: “Sherman’s large-scale color
photographs are beautiful and seductive from afar; as we approach them,
phantasmatic tableaux of hysterical women, zombies, and monsters appear in scenes
awash with repugnant details of bodily fluids and deformed anatomies.” 408 Taylor
termed Sherman’s strategy one of “abrupt defamiliarization…which does not
accommodate passive, desirous contemplation.”
With regard to Wall, peas and sauce and an octopus (food remainders,
or rotting food), blood-stained garments (bodily fluid), and a wall in a former bakery
that could be blood-stained, are not only seductive, but abject. The same is true of the
dirty mop, the rusty water and the stained surfaces and dirty soap of the diagonal
compositions. They are subjects and substances that rob scopic pleasure from the
viewer of Wall’s lighted images, once truly seen. These works create a sense of
defamiliarization, or alienation in Brecht’s terminology, although not with the same
degree of shock, perhaps, as Sherman’s vomit images. The better term might be
disillusionment.
Dirt and Washing
In Wall’s diagonal compositions, there is a focus on dirt. Sinks, which
are sites for cleansing, work best if they are clean. Wall’s sinks, including the areas
around them, are stained beyond redemption. Years of use have rendered them
408
Ibid., 62.
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permanently scarred, irrespective of any effort to clean them, thus rendering the sinks
at least partly dysfunctional. Even the soap is dirty, and the filthy mop in Diagonal
Composition no. 3 could not possibly clean a floor. Dirt and stains are objects of base
materialism in Bataille’s lexicon and have figured in the more recent discourse of the
abject. Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote of the cultural relativity of dirt in her
1966 book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo,
which was a source for Kristeva, as well as for more recent authors exploring the
concepts of dirt and defilement in postmodern art. 409
In the 1992 Whitney Museum exhibition titled “Dirt & Domesticity:
Constructions of the Feminine,” dirt was the subject of the show, including its
association with femininity and the “socially ‘low’”; its relation to the concept of the
abject in contemporary art; and its appearances in work described as “hybrids,” in
which materials are displaced from familiar contexts. Relying heavily on Bataille,
Douglas and Kristeva, Frazer Ward described abjection as “the subject’s convulsed
response to filth,” and examined the use of abjection as material in the work of
Andres Serrano and Cindy Sherman, among others. 410
The appearance of Wall’s first diagonal composition in 1993, then,
coincided with a significant focus on abjection in art, including the 1993 discussion
among art historians referred to above, the Whitney exhibitions in 1992 and 1993,
and the exhibition of the informe at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996, for which
409
Taylor, 79, quoting Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 9: “What is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in
relation to another, and vice versa. The idiom of pollution lends to itself a complex algebra which
takes into account the variables in each context.” Taylor was speaking of the art of David Hammons,
which is culturally oppositional: “Dirt reflects the everyday environment and offers itself as a critique
of antiseptic polish and anality (authoritarianism).” p. 79.
410
Frazer Ward, “Foreign and Familiar Bodies,” in Dirt & Domesticity, 8-37.
184
Formless: A User’s Guide was the catalogue. 411 Wall has not participated in the
written discourse on the abject, and its foundations in Bataille’s version of Surrealism
and Kristiva’s psychoanalytic theory probably would not interest him. Moreover, as
has been demonstrated, Wall has incorporated trash, discarded food and discarded
food wrappers in his art from the beginning. Yet, there are correspondences between
the dirt and trash in Wall’s work and abjection in other artists’ work, beginning with
Cindy Sherman in early 1980s. Abjection is a significant element of the milieu in
which Wall has been operating.
A counterpart to Wall’s images of dirty, stained and scarred surfaces is a
group of works that depict washing and cleaning. They include Swept (1995) [fig.
III-24]; Housekeeping (1996) [fig. III-25]; Volunteer (1996) [fig. III-26]; Just Washed
(1997) [fig. III-15]; and Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation,
Barcelona (1999) [fig. III-27]. Wall has said of these images,
… over the past few years I’ve made a number of pictures on or
somehow related to the theme of cleaning or washing or of housework.
There is much to say about dirt and washing. It is an opposition like
‘the raw and the cooked’. I like things to be clean and neat…But I
also like dirty sinks, the soggy abandoned clothes I see in the alley
behind my studio…rusted dried pools of liquid and all the other
picturesque things so akin to the spirit of photography. 412 (Emphasis
added.)
The common thread among these works is the idea that one just cannot get things
clean, despite repeated efforts. Just Washed, ironically, shows an arm holding a
411
The French version was l’Informe: mode d’emploi, exh. cat. (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou,
1996).
412
Wall, “A note about cleaning,” JWCR 393. The statement, made in 2000, was followed by a
comment about the cleaners at the Mies van der Rohe Foundation with whom Wall interacted in
producing Morning Cleaning. He listed the works set forth above, except for Diagonal Composition
no. 3, but acknowledged that there are “maybe some others.” The building being cleaned in Morning
Cleaning is a reconstructed example of high modernism in the Weimar period, a building designed as a
pavilion for an international exhibition, and, as such, constitutes another of Wall’s references to early
twentieth-century modernism.
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white cloth with black stains that could not be washed out, over a washing machine.
Housekeeping, Volunteer and Morning Cleaning refer to daily efforts to clean
everyday spaces that, of course, just get dirty again. Volunteer depicts a worker
mopping the floor in what might be a daycare center, using the bucket seen later in
Diagonal Composition no. 3. The dirty rag mop and the “volunteer’s” laconic pose
create doubt that this space could ever be clean. Housekeeping, depicting a
housekeeper walking out the door of a just-cleaned hotel room, suggests that the
cleaning that is performed in a hotel room produces only an illusion for the next guest
that the room has not recently been occupied. And Swept shows that no matter how
hard one sweeps, the space still looks dirty.
The cleaning images would suggest that one has to accept the fact that
routine and repeated cleaning can only go so far. There will always be dirty spaces,
from basement corners to idealized architectural pavilions, which contain and reveal
“the dirt and ugliness with which we have to live.” When one thinks about the
activities depicted in works about cleaning, one concludes that this is one more
weapon in Jeff Wall’s arsenal of tactics of aesthetic disillusionment.
Blind Windows
Three images titled Blind Window (all 2000) [figs. III-28, III-29 and III30, respectively] block vision altogether. Each shows a window, apparently in a
basement, that is boarded up, totally occluded, or blacked out and partly covered with
cobwebs. The first two appear to be in the basement studio in which pictures such as
Some Beans, An Octopus and Swept were taken. Swept, also, includes two boardedup windows. The windows in Blind Window no. 1 and Blind Window no.2 are not
186
only boarded up, but have wooden boards nailed across them, adding to the sense of
being enclosed, even imprisoned. Blind Window no. 3 shows the outside of a
basement window, through which one cannot see because of the angle of the view
and the fact that the glass appears black. All three images were taken from a
relatively close vantage point, placing the viewer in a confined, almost claustrophobic
space. If a window is supposed to be an opening to the world, Wall has completely
frustrated that possibility. In effect, these works show the viewer nothing. I would
argue that they may be the most forceful images within Wall’s multi-faceted
demonstration of disillusionment, or the disruption of vision and scopic pleasure.
Emanating from lightboxes, the first two blind windows are large in scale, 109 by 133
cm, and 134 by 170.5 cm, respectively. Yet the occluded views and neutral colors—
brown wood and gray walls—offer limited aesthetic pleasure.
Wall’s Disillusionment
Jeff Wall’s spectacular transparencies are pictures of everyday
contemporary life that, at first glance, appear readily intelligible. As has been shown,
however, there are myriad ways in which these images challenge the viewer by
defying easy understanding. Wall has utilized theories of the early twentieth century
to prolong viewing and promote contemplation. They include the use of exaggerated
gestures, in a manner reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater; the placement of
human figures who seem to occupy the margins of society in locations and situations
that question the distribution of wealth in this late-capitalist era of abundance and
waste; the use of oblique perspectives combined with abject subjects; the depiction of
dirty corners and blind windows which cannot be made clean; and the inclusion of
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visual obstructions by means of physical objects such as transmission wires and tree
branches. In his work of the early 1980s, in particular, Wall has drawn on wellknown paintings of early modernism in formulating his pictures, thus adding a layer
of art history that some viewers can take into account in their efforts at interpretation.
In those references to paintings, and in references to early twentieth-century radical
photographic techniques in some works of the 1990s, Wall has created complex
works of art that arrest viewers who are willing and able to take the time to try to
understand them. In using the methods described in this chapter, often in
combination, Wall has attracted spectators to his luminous works, only to disrupt their
viewing pleasure by making them work to apprehend the many possible embedded
meanings.
Forest Pictures
There is one case in which one might compare the thwarted legibility of
images, by Wall and Richter, respectively, leading one to wonder if Wall had in mind
Richter’s Lovers in the Forest (1966) [fig. III-31]. Richter’s work, in shades of gray,
shows two persons in the winter woods, partly hidden by trees trunks and branches,
and obscured by his signature blur. Wall’s black-and-white silver gelatin print Forest
(2001) [fig. III-32] shows a wooded winter scene, in which two figures walk to the
left heading out of the picture. They leave behind some possessions near a small fire
in the center of the image. The unusual aspect of this picture for Wall is that the
figures are very much obscured by the leafless trees of the forest, so that they are
barely noticeable. They are not mentioned in the title, and, perhaps most important is
the fact that this image is one of Wall’s relatively few black-and-white gelatin silver
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prints, which he has produced only since 1996. The shades of gray link this image
even more closely to Richter’s. Since this is one of Wall’s cinematographic works,
meaning it is one which he constructed using performers, it bears the full weight of
his intentions. This is not to claim that Wall has returned to his earlier practice of
reconstructing images from art history, but only to remark that in this case he has
found still another way to disrupt visual pleasure in the viewing of his art.
Transparency and Opacity in Gerhard Richter’s Scopic Disruptions
In addition to Forest, Jeff Wall’s blind windows can be considered a
useful transition to Gerhard Richter’s several means of disrupting scopic pleasure in
his paintings. In addition to his photopaintings, discussed in Chapter Two in
connection with the concept of medium, in which Richter has employed the “blur” to
efface the clarity of the image and to distance painted works from the photographs
from which they were derived, Richter has produced three bodies of work since the
late 1960s that renounce image altogether, and, in two of those, he has relinquished
color as well. The abstract paintings, which typically, but not always, involved color,
were discussed earlier in connection with their technique. The works in which
Richter has relinquished both image and color are his gray paintings and his mirror
works, some of which are enameled glass. According to Reinhard Spieler, between
1962 and 1993, just under half of Richter’s paintings lacked color. 413 Richter began
his gray monochromes in 1968. Although facture in the gray paintings varies
413
Reinhard Spieler, ed., Preface to Ohne Farbe Without Color (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005),
10.
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considerably, they create distance and alienation in the viewer, and require a more
intellectual response than those that include images or color. 414
Richter relates the color gray to both the process and desired effect of
his painting, which, as demonstrated earlier, is integrally related to photography:
It is possible that my preference for gray derives from photography,
that this has something to do with the cause, but in the case of the
finished painting it has nothing more to do with the photograph, it is
only painting.
Gray. It really has no message, it doesn’t stimulate feelings or
associations and is actually neither visible nor invisible. Being so
inconspicuous makes it so suitable for transmitting, for illustrating—
and in an almost illusionist way, similar to that of a photograph. And,
more than any other color, it is perfect for the illustration of
“nothing.” 415
Luc Lang has described perceptively the way in which Richter’s gray
pictures are connected to the gray of photography:
But Richter does not only mix black and white paint below a
monochrome gray threshold, he also paints paintings that are “all
gray…reminding us of Kodak’s 8” x 10” neutral gray card that is used
to check exposure meters or to take light readings for scenes
particularly difficult to photograph. The change in perception
provoked by changing scale and enlarging Kodak’s card to 200 x 150
cm or 300 to 150 cm…would by no means justify Richter’s
monochrome production if the monochromes did not also provide the
opportunity to explore the immediate vicinity of medium gray, and,
above all, to experiment with the phenomenon of light absorption and
reflection, unlike Kodak’s famous gray card whose sole purpose is to
reflect exactly eighteen per cent of the light it receives….So Richter
sets out to mix and combine brilliance and matteness, to take every
liberty in experimentation and manifest in paint all the nuances of
expression possible within the parameters of photography’s extremely
normative and technically limited optical vocabulary. 416
414
Variations in facture can be seen, for example, in Gray Streak (1968) and Unpainting (Gray)
(1972), each 200 by 200 cm.
415
Gerhard Richter, quoted in Spieler, 51, citing, respectively, a film portrait by Victoria von
Flemming on NDR German Television, 1987; and a letter from Richter to Edy de Wilde, February 23,
1975.
416
Luc Lang, “The Photographer’s Hand: Phenomenology in Politics,” in Gerhard Richter (Paris:
Editions Dis Voir, 1995), 42.
190
The illustration of nothing in the gray monochromes is, perhaps, the limit of the
disruption of scopic pleasure in looking at a painting. This is not to say that Richter’s
handling of gray painting in his myriad ways does not produce interesting aesthetic
effects, but, clearly, the artist wished to paint and to say nothing.
One could connect certain of the gray paintings to Wall’s blind
windows. Consider, for example, Richter’s series of curtain pictures produced in
1964 and 1965. Curtain III (bright) (1965) [fig. III-33] is a picture of a curtain,
hanging in folds and rendered in a blurred spectrum of light to dark grays. 417 The
opacity of Curtain III is two-fold: the depicted fabric itself is opaque and completely
fills the canvas, and the notion of a curtain is congruent with that of a blind window:
one’s expectations of seeing through a window are frustrated. Thus, Richter and Wall
have, in different ways, completely obscured the view and thwarted the viewer who
assumes that there is a window behind the curtain or a view through a window.
Richter has also painted some images of windows in which the view is occluded:
Barred Window (Fenstergitter) (1968) in which the shadows of the bars between the
panes show through the surface bars, within a very shallow space; and Shadow
Painting, also 1968 [fig. III-34], a similar but smaller image.
Given the textures and painterly facture of Richter’s gray paintings,
perhaps his mirrors say even less. In 1965, Richter designed his first sculptural
mirror work, Four Panes of Glass (1967) [fig. III-35]. This was the first of a series of
glass panel works that have been variously produced. This work consists of four
clear panes of glass mounted in free-standing joined metal frames, each 190 by 100
417
Ibid., 49. This painting measures 200 by 195 cm., somewhat larger than Wall’s blind windows.
191
cm, thus roughly corresponding to the standing human body. 418 In this first glass
work, the viewer looks through the clear panes of glass to whatever is behind them, as
if they were windows. They can only frame what is on the other side. Through the
1990s, Richter produced monochrome glass panels that darkly reflect the space
around them by combining glass with oil paint. Gray Mirror (1992) [fig. III-36] is a
four-panel work, with each panel measuring 300 by 100 cm.
Perhaps Richter’s most vaunted installation of painted mirror pieces was
designed for the opening of Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, a work titled Eight Gray
(2001) [fig. III-37]. In the original installation, four gray mirrored pieces were placed
on facing walls in a long gallery, so that they each reflected the surrounding space,
including their own reflections in the works across the room. Richter insisted that the
windows in the gallery facing the Unter den Linden be opened so that the street scene
could become a part of the works. 419 The glass panels “are mounted on metal frames
with fastenings that can be loosened, allowing the artist or the curator [and by
implication, the spectator] to manipulate the angles of the panels by tilting them
slightly, reorienting their reflections.” 420 Thus, there is no necessary fixed image
reflected in the panels.
Clearly, Wall’s and Richter’s approaches to the denial or frustration of
visual pleasure are quite different. Wall’s transparencies are extraordinarily clear,
colorful images of recognizable objects and scenes, whereas Richter’s photopaintings
418
Doris Krystof, “Visual Speculations: Mirrors and Glass in the Work of Gerhard Richter,” in Speiler,
83, figure 4.
419
Krystof, 85. See, also, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Eight Gray: Between
Vorschein and Glanz,” in Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, 2002), 14-28. A second installation of gray mirrors, Six Gray Mirrors (2003), was
produced for the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York. Spieler, 10.
420
Ibid., 27.
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renounce color, limit detail and blur the image so that the viewer is perplexed in
working to discern what is actually shown. The veracity that comes with making a
painting look like a blurred photograph is undermined not only by the blur, but, also,
by the details that Richter has eliminated from the original model.
Perhaps the limit case of Gerhard Richter’s disruption of scopic pleasure
is his 128 Details from a Picture (1978) [one detail, fig. III-38]. Richter’s statement
describes the process of the making of this work:
In the summer of 1978, I took photographs of the surface of an oil
sketch on canvas (78 x 52 cm, 1978—it had been previously exhibited
in my exhibition Pictures at the Anna Leonowen’s Gallery of the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design.) The photographs were taken from
various sides, from various angles, various distances and under
different light conditions.
The resulting 128 photographs were organized in two versions: one,
the sequential order that is presented here under the covers of a book,
and a second version which is presented pictorially in grid-form (128
details from a picture, 1978, 127 x 400 cm, photographs on board,
framed, Collection Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld). 421
In this case, Richter photographed his own painting, as described, and presented it in
a grid format from which it cannot be reconstructed. The viewer of the photographic
grid might assume that if he only could rearrange the parts, he could discover an
intelligible painting. But, of course, the painting was abstract. This work may be
Richter’s ultimate disruption of scopic pleasure; it reverses his typical process by
deconstructing a painting by means of photography.
421
Gerhard Richter, “Author’s Note,” in 128 Fotos von Einem Bild 1978 (Cologne: Walther König,
1998), np. This book presents each photographic fragment of the painting on a separate page, so that
only one fragment can be viewed at a time. As mentioned in Chapter Two, Richter had taught at the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1977 at the invitation of Benjamin Buchloh. Thus, the
fragmentation and deconstruction of the painting may have been influenced by that experience. The
work was previously published as One Hundred Twenty-eight Details of a Picture, The Nova Scotia
Pamphlets 2 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980).
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SUMMARY STATEMENT
This study is intended as a theoretical analysis of the discourse
surrounding the emergence of large-scale, color photography around 1980, through an
examination of the art praxes of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter. As North American
and West German art shifted away from Conceptual Art, which had dominated
advanced art practice since the mid-1960s, and in which deskilled, amateurish blackand-white photographs combined with text predominated, there developed a
vociferous discourse concerning the art that was taking its place. Large-scale,
colorful, figurative paintings and photographs began to dominate international art
exhibitions and to make their way into galleries and museums.
The most strident aspect of the discourse emanated from a group of
fundamentally Marxist critics and academicians who viewed the perceived turn to
more aesthetic art forms as a dangerous and undesirable capitulation to the political
hegemony of the newly-elected conservative administration in the United States, and
to a burgeoning and increasingly international art market fueled by improving
economic conditions. Thus, their criticism of figurative and pictorial art looked less
than carefully at the art and the stated positions of the artists, and judged what they
saw as radically retrogressive.
As a way of illuminating the discourse, this study has examined the
complex, multivalenced art practices of two major artists of the late-twentieth
century: the photography of Jeff Wall and the painting of Gerhard Richter. It has
done so by mining the criticism in order to elucidate the limits of art-historical writing
that emanates from a rigid theoretical position and fails to carefully consider the art.
194
Moreover, because both Wall and Richter are highly intellectual artists who have
contributed many writings and public statements to the discourse, their writings and
statements have been given considerable weight. Their voices are invoked here as
full participants. Consequently, this study constitutes an account of the positions of
the most important protagonists in the art-historical discourse of the period from the
late 1970s through the 1980s in North America and West Germany.
As stated in the Introduction, and as evidenced throughout this study,
there is no precise beginning, nor is there an end to the discussion of which this
discourse forms a part. There exists a historical narrative, or, more accurately,
numerous historical narratives, of Modernism and of what has succeeded it if
Modernism indeed has ended. As suggested by parentheses in the title of this study,
and as illustrated by Jeff Wall’s many allusions to iconic works of art throughout the
history of Modernism, Wall does not perceive a break between Modernism and
Postmodernism. Richter’s work also reflects facets of the rich history of Western art.
In sum, this study considers a rather short period in a long history that
reaches back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. As evidenced by the concerns of
some dominant voices in the discourse of that brief period, it engages particularly
with theories of the early twentieth century. As a chapter in a longer narrative, this
study elucidates the terms with which certain ambitious art of the late 1970s and
the1980s was discussed in light of the social, cultural and political conditions in, and
cultural interchanges between, West Germany and North America. There can be no
conclusion. The terms will shift as the conditions and the art change, but the
discussion will continue.
195
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I list here only the writings that have been of use in the writing of this dissertation.
This bibliography is by no means a complete record of all the works and sources I
have consulted. It indicates the substance and range of reading upon which I have
formed my ideas, and I intend it to serve as a convenience for those who wish to
pursue the study of the subjects of this dissertation. It is divided into three parts: Art
and Photography: History and Theory; Jeff Wall; and Gerhard Richter.
Art and Photography: History and Theory
Alexander, Darsie. SlideShow. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2005.
Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, Belknap Press, 1978.
Armstrong, Philip, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. As Painting: Division and
Displacement. Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University,
2001.
Armstrong, Richard. “‘Heute,’ Westkunst.” Artforum 20, no. 1 (1981): 83-86.
___ and Richard Marshall. Five Painters in New York. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1984.
Baker, Elizabeth C. “The ‘Return’ of European Art.” Art in America (Special
Issue: Europe ’82) 70, no. 8 (1982): 5.
Baker, George. “Photography’s Expanded Field.” October 114 (Fall 2005): 120-40.
Barbut, Marc. “On the Meaning of the Word ‘Structure’ in Mathematics.” In
Introduction to Structuralism, edited by Michael Lane, 367-88. New York:
Basic Books, 1970.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard
Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.
___. “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.” In Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen
Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977.
___. “The Photographic Message.” In Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen
Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977.
196
___. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath.
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